Lines on a passage
- Dec 9, 2022
- 1 min read
by Akhila Pingali
The evening arrives early on moth-wings, crisp and shaded. We occupy the last dregs of light. You, sunk in your pages, and I, motioning in the dawn beyond your dipped head. It washes in, the pink of beetroot stains, of your eyes following a timeline not of here. I flick a parsimonious evening breeze off my cheek. It turns a page
and out of the cuckoo’s mouth the morning crescendos. Echoes in your story wrap
your figure black against the reeling dusk, and through the undulating shadow, I know this:
I cannot leave this arc. What if, leaving, it smooths into memory; wavering, stills
into other sides of glass and moving waters.
Akhila Pingali is a research scholar and translator based in Hyderabad, India. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in SoFloPoJo, Brave Voices Magazine, Five Minutes, Tint Journal, Contemporary Literary Review India, and an anthology called Ninety-Seven Poems. You can find her on Twitter @AkhilaPingali.
