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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Dismantled

By Rachana Hegde

 

I am whittled down to eight years old: all shaky hands and

fingers stunned numb. There’s a muted street & a house

 

hiding behind a lamp. The gutter overflows with pre-dawn light and

the manhole is a wound cauterized, awful in the way it droops.

 

A bedroom lies dismantled. I rest a hand against its underbelly,

learning how a house moulders. My parents are cluttered, scuttling

 

around an orphaned home. This place looks like the still life of a fruit

covered in soot, hijacked & rotting in the palms of our hands.

 

A year passes. And still, there is an awful light in my

mother’s eyes when she looks at the sky. It is different.

 

I know her fears intimately: contorted & swarming.

 

Ten years later, a pheasant couches me, in a bland sketch of

sakura trees. Cherry blossoms scale the mountains of my childhood.

 

I am looking through a window & seeing my parents dappled

with moonlight. Distance is coiled in the strands of our hair.

 

I reverberate with antiquity;

& each place is a second chance I will not miss.

 

 

 

Rachana Hegde collects words and other oddities. Her poetry has been published in Alexandria Quarterly, Moonsick Magazine, and Hypertrophic Literary. You can find her reading, drowsy-eyed, or at www.rachanahegde.weebly.com.

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Winter Poems 2017

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