Landscape with Girl and Ibises
Each day
endless ladies clawed
up moss-covered rocks
to hightail it to
blacktop through miles of
empty forest. It was
always summer, daddy
like a waterfall
crashed into
pools of ladies
in bikinis.
It was the time
of year when hatchlings
fell from
nests—did she
mean to
escape? plunging
from the top
or just vault
into the flume?
Mama watched me watch
a medic stretcher
her off not bloody
but broken, her glass
eyes open
like dolly
who never
sleeps but all night
stares at the curtains—
like that, I
eyeballed the rocks. Forget it,
mama said, it’s
too dangerous, so we’d
swim and
swim in mist
piped in among trills
of mechanical
ibises. Onlookers tossed
pennies heavy
and cold that I
dove for, my fingers
gouging blue
paint chipped from the pool
floor. I wedged pennies
into toe gaps stuffed
the lining of my
bikini top till
it burst and they jabbed
at my breasts I crammed
them into my mouth
I would’ve guzzled more
if I could. Help, I meant
to shout to the girl,
mute, wading
near the pool’s
edge, her wishes
moneyless. I
shoved her
my dripping
fistfuls—I have
nowhere
to put this.
No Money for Boots
Mama requested birthday lilies
so you stomped through snow
to the florist’s beige counter, tiled floor.
Tiger lilies. No dull
white for her, no pink tongue center
plucked fresh from a mountain path.
It was six years since daddy yanked
the spark plugs and left,
no groceries in the fridge, Friday night
paycheck already spent on next month’s rent.
You nearly crushed them getting back,
bare legs bright red
like knuckles, simultaneously
snow-wet and bled. And stars in snowdrifts
glittered. Not stars but tiny crystals
moved when you moved down the block, a wave of stars
followed you home
and the stems
gone bent
and you not broken.
Ellen Kombiyil is the author of the full-length poetry collection Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (Ryga, 2016), and has new work in The Fiddlehead, Pleiades, Prelude, and Tinderbox. She has read, performed or taught workshops at Split This Rock, the Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore, India. She is a co-Founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora.