Spellhounded
by Ritiksha Sharma


ncook1234                                                                                                   




2.13 am, inside a dictionary/ learning how to spell

incantation”/ Iris-cuffing the print, transferring

from page to hand, from hand to cerebrum; the words

cast out like a die/ artefacts of decompression hulking

with incredulity; t’is a volatile parchment, the mind and its muscles

Contracting from the glaze of a poetry high/

I was led to believe it was a dream; standing motionless

wet hair and dry clothes/ the door to my left/ no, to the right/ no,

behind me probably/ Somewhere in my house,

but somewhere I had never been/ No,

 

it was a nightmare,/ mist cyclone on the glass

inside my bathroom mirror; refusing to reflect,

raiding consciousness for evidence of hydromancy/

 

Something written in the water;

the terms for the mist to shift, spell to work/

and it worked, a little too well,

a little too fast/ The water poured from me

into the cracks in the tiles/ coursing, slithering,

finally clicking into place; chiming ingress:

a purported summoning/ A silhouette in the mirror

chasing form and line: stepped out without warning.

 

Eyes stretched into slits of ochre-flames/ pulling out

from the mirror vortex/ wings torn, chipped at the edges,

decorated on her frostbitten lower-lip/ Sounded like

an unkindness of ravens/ A scream plagiarized 

from knowledge of living things; and my own mouth

screaming back, an egress of self-will/

 

I prayed to the gods who had walked out on me/ the gods

who created us both and forgot to check back in; when

the unkindness tripped over the sink into my arms;

was a seafaring sphinx,

 

now, living in the shadow of my left hand/ a prisoner

of the mirror freed/ kissed me first, sang to me later

“Don’t trust me”/ Bit my neck and whispered “I trust you”/

 

She ate eagles with tea, passed around

chocolate covered strawberries at the dinner-table;

Gawking from the inside, past my skin and out,

Somehow my hands working in synchrony/ Give and take,

 

a dance learned from habits of her vices: Night-hunting

for appetizers and cheating lovers, sitting in wait for

hex-eyed step-people/ Down with every gulp

of mama’s juniper soup/ Yet, she licked her lips,

standing behind my granddad at lunch/ as if

she hadn’t cleaned blood with her tongue

from the dining-room wall that very morning/

sitting every night in the light outside my parent’s room,

eyes glowing ochre still/ Last sixty-nine days

 

when we stayed our execution of peace,

pacing towards a god’s menu for her bloodthirst/

Last sixty-nine days, I learnt

how to go sleepless ninety-six different ways; that

midnight lullabies are made of air trapped in bat-wings/

That fearpolis was not planetary, t’was my home

 

That she moistened her lips

every time I grimaced in my sleep/ and the bite on my neck

has been growing deeper/ every time I shiver 

under the spaceless weight of her body/ Until memory

 

receded into fugue/ No way to uncast the die;

In between her Mephistophelean hearsay: the

she said, he said”, the “I once knew a garden gnome

who loved to play with matchsticks”, the negotiations

and hell-contracts/ she taught me not to ask

if my disposition was inherited or acquested/ No matter

how hard anyone scrubbed the glass/

The mist was there to stay,

those were the terms now.










Raggedstone                        



Ritiksha Sharma is an Indian poet and artist. She likes to explore tenebrific splinters of people, their feelings and pasts.