“Tomato Garden” and Other Poems
By Ananya Kanai Shah
Tomato Garden
father, lover of fresh pineapple
red grapes plucked by hand
your shorn nails stem
neck incision heavy with residual
blood, garland of tubes
cheeks warmed by a blanket
specter of breath,
pomegranate hued
lips the color of drained tomatoes
in the cold, a wheelbarrow
beguiled by sudden frost
golden peppers jaundiced
warm blood; my companion
the diaphanous morning did not save you
as you swam ashore
Beauty on an Autumn Day
Fall, and there is less salt in the soil
this year. Her untrimmed body, its sabbatical
she has made up her mind
to enjoy; the other body in jest:
always slightly tangential to her angles.
Beige walls, tart—
the artfulness of sliced
air, too-muchness
of cinnamon. Is there any understanding
here? She thinks of roasted acorns
on Walden Pond. The hair’s caramel smell.
Dawn’s sandstone light under
the covers, everywhere on the trees,
a guttural yellow. The pink
of her nails flatlining
to burgundy. Rabid,
the wishbone cleaves.
Yesterday you showed
me those raccoons teething on plush
nectarines, their particular ribosomic
energy unbound by
longing. Oh! If I
had known it would end like this,
I would have washed
my nightgown. The front of it
smeared with eyeliner.
A New Yorker in Paris
Ambergris and orange wine a noose
from every balcony. Mercy, he would have said.
On an old soul. How are you so fast in heels.
A cathedral at every corner. I have forgotten
the Lord’s Prayer that we recited each day
at Mount Carmel. Walking along the Seine to Sainte Chappelle—
blue and red roil & splinter, an orchestra
that stuns the mind. I could not hold your hand
when they injected tubes into your neck, Pappa.
Blue in the Tibetan Book of the Dead—
all matter aggregates into primordial
blue, Dharma lives in those vast reserves
of blue light—cobalt or sky I do not know—
that pierce the newly dead, quickening
their resolve. A soul forced into aeration.
I read this so it would help me.
On this side of solitude, a fistful.
A rhapsody by Rachmaninoff levitates.
Glamour’s irony—
a blade of grass in yellow, its sublimity
collapsing into petulance. It is uncool to look
stressed in a city of nonchalance
and long linen dresses puckered
at the waist. Ten years ago we saw Monet’s water lilies
float from spring into summer in the rotunda
at the Orangerie; yet again, I marvel at gentleness,
unimpressed that death is a test.
How much did you need
to go through alone? Your personality is artistic
so you should learn French. Just like New York, I can trace
where we walked all day long. Setting sun at 10 pm,
long warm day stretched across the skin, hurtling
chest, this “young lady” with a headache
and looking for minor absolution.
By Whose Permission
did the sage balconies
erupt into vines? There
is just you and me here
and the mice in the walls.
Always the mice. Hunger
swells until it becomes
solid like calcite. Your
hands swell until they
befuddle orchids,
the wasp’s itch, its
macabre wish to be fossilised
in sugar. I warned you
this would not be
enough. On Shaftesbury,
I am my dark sunglasses,
silvering a cure. I read The Historian
when I was ten because my father
let me and never forgot the thrill
of poring over old letters
in a monastery, its gothic
mystery, to search
for the undead. Agnus dei,
soft in sleep
and matted in ecstasy.
I am looking (oh so deeply!)
for the luminous
material of you.
Please remind me
that the interior
is always in need
of a rummaging.
In another abbey, a mass
murder, a stolen treatise
on laughter. Its unknitting
of starch. Like Adso, I would
have risked my life to look
for lightness. In my lap:
an open face.
Porcelain fragility
enameled on a yellow
dress. What if someone—
the beast of me—knocks
it dry? Corroded by water,
the harbor in sunset
gleams. Your face
an intruder. How
does it feel to share
your loneliness with
another person? Light’s
olive undertones rake
hair, catatonic.
My favorite date is karaoke.
Burgundy air,
a guitarist bemused
that a woman brought him
to his knees, one song
in the dark. Another still
consecrated by elbows.
My voice taking on some of you.
Ananya Kanai Shah was born in Boston and raised in Ahmedabad, India. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a BA in Applied Math-Economics and Literary Arts from Brown University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares; The Los Angeles Review of Books; The Yale Review; Indian Literature, managed by Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters; the offing; Adroit Journal; and other magazines. She is currently working on her first collection of poems.
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Shivangi Chandrasekhar was born in India and raised in England. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts at Loughborough University, focusing on artwork produced by Indian Diaspora artists. She then pursued a Master's degree Migration Studies to combine her interests in art and culture. Her artwork predominantly conveys her journey in the third space: she explores her experiences of a lived cultural plurality by drawing on her non-Western cultural roots in order to portray her hybrid identity. She is currently working on her own Tanjore Painting collection.
Robert Hirschfield pays an insightful and heartfelt tribute to a haiku master of South India.