after Simone White
hour in which i consider the sky – mustard bright, although in my house we only eat whole grain – the speckled surface, something yellow and black like a taxi but liquefied. the sky is rippling like my best silk, gossamer fine, half past five, i have lost … i have lost, yes, all sense of time and space. are the weeks still happening, i see day fade into night spark into day blink into – i have grown external, i am a ghost to my body. each plant on my window sill is a body, green and light and breathing – i wonder what it takes to photosynthesise; i am the wind on the surface of the leaves, as light as a laugh, and as beautiful. the world is beautiful, the branches cast shadows that dance like disco lights, and it is beautiful, and the sky is chrome and it burns beautiful. my mother soaks yellow lentils in the big drum, she is singing, and it is also beautiful. i don’t know the words. i am crawling through the walls to follow the hum, this whisper. i am an ant, a fly, the mosquito hovering over the back of her neck. she tries to kill it. i am not there; i am in the living room singing a different song about the colours of the sky. when i step into the kitchen it is full of her traces – the lentils, of course, swollen and fat, the water jug which used to be empty. half past five, do i move like time, in flashes? (i think i am too slow, it is all the weight of limbs and body and wristwatch and mind) i don’t want to eat yellow lentils but they sit there, arrogant and i have lost the war. as an object, a mother is confusing, a middle-aged mother with a propensity to sing songs that are older than me. she has been a person longer than i have been alive. this is the hour for thinking yellow. only the sky is a voyeur – chrome and unforgiving. i am tired of such men, i shut the window. no one is singing, humming. i look in on my mother in her room but she doesn’t pay attention. why must she pay attention? perhaps she has been talking to the sky.
Trishita Das (she/her) decided to become a writer at age six, but then got distracted and became a cliche literature student, a teacher and an occasional rhyme goblin of the internet. She writes poems exploring the ideas of identity, mental health and archiving everyday life. Her works have been featured in several publications including The Remnant Archive, Ang(st) Feminist Zine, Plum Tree Tavern and Free Verse Revolution. She also enjoys fluffy dogs, culinary experiments, and bathroom singing.