Poetry by Reya Senthil Kumar
July is a synonym for misery—
Breathing is the art of living. Cellular respiration, when the strawberry honey-stinger chews in the pocket of my running shorts have melted into their components of glucose, gelatin, citric acid, red 40, and stuff them into my mouth. A chewy consistency, locking my jaw in place and my teeth clamped shut. Mmmh, the taste of summer (cloying, boredom). My hands were stained in a thin film of sweat as the skin pulled taut with sugar glazed fingertips. I rubbed them against polyester shorts, but they didn’t absorb any of the lingering wetness on my palms, liar. I fiddled at the torn logo that peeled off like old yellowing Victorian wallpaper. Patch-work, shoddy, stunting, poisonous—both to us, and to whichever landfill they became buried in. You could never trust the synthetic fibers to help. Instead, drop down onto the front of silicon rubber beads with equally sharp strips of swamp-green nylon tapering into fine blades of faux grass. The turf was merciless in its manner that stuck to my melting body, but the sun appeared more desperate in getting a front seat to the ticket of “My Misery VIII: Life is Plastic, It’s Not Fantastic."
“The blotted sky in frigid winds burns less than the fumes of a dumpster fire.”
—so shall I compare thee to a winter’s night instead?
There was a sting, a stable prickle spread on the surface of my skin, that developed into a numb sensation on the sore muscles that lined against the outer sides of my thigh. The heatwaves I could make out swirling in a monotonous pattern, the eye-aching form of the sky bright that reflected too much water, all gone as I clenched my eyes shut. I could revel in the cooling sensation, reminiscent of tiger balm rubbed into the sun-shorn tissue of my calves, arms, forearms, with calloused, gentle fingers of my grandpa. Sitting under the shade of a portico that could only fit the two of us, feet outstretched and the languid breeze a lullaby to rest. “Have your senses taken in the cold, darling?” I open my tightened eyes, once the orange flare of my eyelids turn dark (burning, hypnotic). There was only the flutter of eyelashes as they looked down through tinted sunglasses, with the same bodacious effort of a male peacock screaming high on the parapets of a hand-carved tin roof. A hellish smile that could put imps into a coma. Their gums peaked out, pomegranate fruit ripe for the picking with hollow seashell knuckles unfolding into crescent moons placed on the edge of a sticky mouth, mapping the lines of dried bark on chapped lips, drawing down the slant edges of a slackened jaw, a fine ice. Touched by the very jack of all frost.
“The snow that kisses your cheek and winds that comb through your hair, is that such a terrible relationship to have?