Your Reward for Cleaning Windows is a Clean Window
Sunday smells of cigarettes as the cold ash-tray
fills up with Gold Flakes even before breakfast
and father busies himself in the kitchen helping mother.
Once breakfast is done, we gather together
to celebrate father being home for the weekend
by cleaning the house. He dusts the fans
as mother separates the clothes for washing – uniforms/
whites/work colours/sundries. Sister dusts the shelves,
I wipe the windows. Dad sweeps the floor and mom mops.
In the sparkling clean house, we enjoy afternoon tv
and lunch as rain falls hard on freshly-wiped windows.
Mangoes
Gravity is too much on our skins.
We drop onto wet earth,
loosed from the branch
to a dark uncertainty.
A leap of faith
or a tumble
into the dark
pull
of mud.
When we are gathered up
will we be raw
sour to the bite
or slimy, overripe?
Bone Picking
On the damp soil we found a velvet antler:
remnants of a struggle left behind for us to find.
Aswin Vijayan is an Assistant Professor at the Zamorin’s Guruvayurappan College, Calicut and has an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast. His poems have been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Verse of Silence, The Tangerine, and Coldnoon among others. He was a Guest Editor for Nether Quarterly’s revival issue and currently serves as the Managing Editor at The Quarantine Train. Follow his writing on Instagram here.