Tamil Nadu, 1904
the barber came yesterday, knife
practicing separation, my thick braid unwound
only to be shorn off. hair is
a woman’s currency, Amma told me once,
& men should be bought not by widows.
at the funeral, I am an effigy: a child, an elegy
overlooking a pyre. my voice rests at the blade
-edge of Amma’s palm, each line a fortune
I won’t complete. the sky: sweat-beaded, stillborn
in heat. I look away from firelight
& think about ghosts haunting my scalp. I am nothing
if not made from negative space: jasmine garlands
unwoven, coconut oil un-massaged by Amma’s fingers.
night speaks a language called weight &
I beg the ceiling to not grow narrower. I doodle a boy
behind my eyelids & try to remember he is
my husband. was. each fissure in the wall heaving.
mosquitos hum & I call it hymn, my flesh
fever-touched, longing for a nameless god. & when morning
claws its way out the earth, I stay pious: I don
ashen sarees & break bell-adorned anklets to lock
in a rosewood chest. promise quietness. fading.
God
on this side of the ocean, we clamp
our accents in gunmetal & tender
our mouths. call it a barrel, the way
it worships friction. our fathers teach us
to steal all the pain we can get our hands on.
our fathers bruise our knees on church
floors, peel our eyes until their reflections
dissolve. we attend sermons masked as meat
-eaters, breath serrated, green cards piled
high, language faked & fucked. our fathers teeth
on powerlines, make us the bones of a bird
pinioned by lightning instead
of the feathers. we preach migration, cool our fire
on saltwater altars. we say violence & violence
& violence over again. repetition is god’s
greatest gift. love thy neighbor, & we angle our bodies
like rifles, name ourselves with numbers. in this
land, we are never more at home. our
fathers scrape the blood off tires, off concrete off
pried ribs. say Christ like curse, like stranglehold.
birds soar & they are still so alone. each
country is another revolver–trembling. fingers
go numb, & we pray to bullet holes or even
a wooden cane, rising, flesh
mispronounced as flight.
K. Kannan is the Editor-in-Chief of Blue Flame Review, a literary magazine dedicated to exploring the intersection between science and writing. A 2025 YoungArts Winner, she has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and Write the World. Her work has been published in Tinderbox Poetry and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among other places. Find her on Twitter @lotusmoonwrites