Indiscernibility

By Prerna Munshi

Through man made systems, 

gills dont frisk past. 

In their little spittle,

one could see 

what they were force fed with

I hadn’t been a renegade much

except for my troubadour’s heart,

meandering through lost words,

ennui, loves- old and the ones yet to be

The closest werent the ones

who bore me either in their wombs

or in their unideated love. 

The closest was the distant

who bloomed

in an agony of distance,

in part erasure of memory and reason. 

While making love,

I kept changing lanes

for there was no Here.

And, scents rehearsed their emanation.

The texture of his hair and 

the texture of his kiss 

felt primordial yet erased

from the algorithms

of my tongue tied gills 

Yet, what could not be calibrated 

in possibilities, happened

like my riverbed emptying into his. 

The adult never forgets suckling. 

Bodies contour on ancient forgotten patterns.

‘Evolutionary traces’, they say. 

Bodies, the site of literal failings, 

Of moral destituteness and 

of every dysfunctionality. 

A trajectory of a longing:

both familiar and stranger,

eroded my primordial knowledge 

about me

And about him. 

What bound us together

was an indiscernibility.  

By Prerna Munshi