Neha Mulay

Two Poems

Crustacean Love

Time is a star burst open

with pomegranate particles everywhere.

Moments never really end,

just gestate forever,

                                      errant seeds in the air.

Mini’s cod breath,

                                  you follow the smell

through the streets of your mind

and there you are, 

                                   five years old,

sucking on mango seeds,

Mini’s gleaming teeth

                                                are approaching

the island between your thighs

and you are lying still

                                           thinking                           

of the drooping red flowers

in the garden,

how they are heavy

                                      and red

                                                       and always open

and how the bees come.

Your Mama has left you with her Mama

and every moment is imminence,

always you are running,

                                            gunning like a radiator,

            Mama’s return

                                                                                        is the horizon.

On your sixth birthday,

Granny fans a wheat cake with her saree

while Mini stands in the doorframe,

and you think, the world is a field,

                                                             Mini is a giant tulip head

                                                             and you

                         are a grass insect.

When the earthquake strikes,

everyone leaves

and you know for sure

                                         that the tremors  
                                                                         are not the earth

they are the static lines in your nerves

                                                                     abuzz.

On your seventh birthday, Mama comes back,

takes you to a foreign land but you

                                                               have abandoned your dolls

                    and taken on the jungle.                                                               

In the jungle you can hunt.

Sometimes you get hurt.

Sometimes you make your own blisters,                                                                        

that is the kiss of the jungle. 

You are twenty-three,

being tamed by a marionette king,

you say, wait, there is a light left on somewhere,

but his mouth is a will that swallows you whole,

his mouth is a crustacean clawing at your distant shores

and you have a basement somewhere

that is overflowing with weaponry,

a pitchfork, a chainsaw, a shield,

but all day long

the crabs are crawling at you,

keeping you pungent company.

Summertime Curled Inwards

It was a time I emerged

from the eggshell I had built

around myself like a pink chick,

cooked tender by the heat within.

Habit lost meaning.

Legs trembled at the thought of strides.

Breath collapsed at the expansive skies.

Surrender was a gargantuan space suit

for this throbbing pea of a body.

That summer my grandmother came to me,

wafting of the monsoon I had forgotten.

Every morning she brewed me coffee,

painstakingly, with flickering flame uncertainty.

On my side, inhaling the grounds,

listening to the garish beckoning

of the flowers in her saree,

grasping the cup, rising, longing for

a home that I had forgotten

and that had forgotten me.

Years ago, I discarded her at the airport,

the little girl I had once been.

I embraced the Australian sun.

Now, I try to find that girl,

try to glean her from old journals

but she is haunting some other world.

It is just me here and the strange, wounded

language of my sunburn.

My insides are cupboards

where I have shelved every loss,

daily I whisper to the locks

but they have forgotten me.

On Coogee Beach,

I try to coax

creatures out of shells,

wonder what it takes

to unfurl like a wave.

Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review and Coffin Bell Journal, among other publications. Her essays have appeared in Overland Literary Journal (online) and Feminartsy. She is the Managing Editor of Honeysuckle Magazine.