Umang Kalra
the sight of a moth tumbling | shadow to light to smoke to dust | the sound of wings crackling | ash | the night is the colour of a tired saturday afternoon | the lamps are coffins and the floor is a graveyard | our laughter is feeble | the crickets are listening | my throat knotting into cobwebs | i am choking on the touch of cotton sheets | we have not met in years | they knew me when i was little | the moths are dead against my skin | the sheets are heavy | my breaths are painful | the sheets are monsters | the floor is ice | the sound of somebody sobbing | the sound of a moth crackling into fire | the sound of heaving lungs | words in a language i do not speak anymore | it is bedtime – my mother is crying | her wails do not fit me | her tears are monsters | my dreams are the colour of my childhood | the shape of the cotton sheets | the moths do not have a mother to cry for them | my eyes are squeezed shut | hands? | breaths | shadows | my tears are monsters | words i have not tasted in a decade | a language made of horror | a sickness in my chest | shadow to light to smoke to dust | my mother is not crying anymore | the air tastes like fear | the sound of a moth dying | the air tastes like resignation | the silence is a monster |
