Every time you place your hope
in the upper shelf of the closet,
there will be a crash.
They say a metal must break to avoid death
so you will let your heart bare open
until it begins to bleed,
only to convince you
hearts don’t shatter like a ceiling
hearts, they ooze out a pipette
composed of voice and valor
not convinced to believe
“20 is too young an age”.
That adage pasted on your wall
to try and lock the brazen rages
that protest through tweets and tweaks
in passive-aggressive Bernie Sanders memes
for another voice to be heard,
Yes, you mislocate your context
against a censoring pandemic
that senses fear
You crawl into the misery of
doing not enough,
of being not enough,
enough times to displace you from your present
into a December that had raged loud,
into a street that felt closer home than Home
had promised it would be.
It’s hollow
only a hullabaloo of privileges
jarred open every glorious Monday
through sly and slithering tones of smooth statements
jagged enough to sanitize
the smell of protest and hope all at once
till despair takes over
You see them come home
fighting over frustrations misdirected in the least
receding only to random musical evenings,
for a family reconciliation to happen
and it happens in the meanest of ways
only to let another heart ooze out a pipette.
The news will be loud,
louder than the horror of you
who couldn’t see outside you
at Ward number 36
an old body that fights but
you are not allowed inside.
You will lock down your tokenistic presence
in a classroom or inside the washing machine
and let it get washed over by breakdowns that reaffirm
your fight was not enough.
It will glisten with fear
through a WhatsApp chat abandoned midway
because you both couldn’t fight it right,
It will start with
a dozen utensils un-cleaned,
a television in dust,
a stain of the pandemic,
and you will fight it every day.
Dear self
lost-in-the-shadow of a yesterday,
every time you place your hope
in the upper shelf of the closet,
you will take it down at midnight
before it crashes
and weave it into a dazzling rage
hung up in the dark of a 3 AM poem.
It will glisten with fear,
You will fight it anyway.
Anushka Srivastava (she/her) is a student of M. A. English from Delhi University, India. Replacing her rage and rest with a sip of poetry, she writes to fill the gap between creative and critical. Her previous works have appeared in The Graveyard Zine, Love Letters Mag, and more.