Porch-Sitter

Diya Chaudhuri

This yard is Calcutta summer: overgrown. A banana decomposing
by my basil plant goes unnoticed too long, part now
of the landscape, blackening.  It’s a curler, like toes.

This is fishing weather – the heat catches in my hair, my hair grows
tumescent, I sweat between the fingers. Ten minutes on the porch
and I’m pruned, my finger pads a stitch job, amateurish, puckered.

Gainesville, Florida is August of 1996, when India won’t end. The sweat
on my thighs: Mom yipping away with old high school friends
while I’m twelve and so over this, a disbelieving stare at a fist-sized mosquito.

Like a man in an open-air market hunkered over a chicken,
his foot planted on its throat, waiting, tetchy, for the flapping to end,
I’m outlasting this summer.  I feel its pulse slowing through my big toe.

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→EMPRISE 16