Aishee Ghoshal
The yellow walled apartment is too small
Yellow what an awful colour
Often smells of the rotten trash
Forgotten in the morning rush
The itchy mattress lies bare
Dirty sheets crumpled in the corner
One solitary candle burns on the windowsill,
One tiny glass lamp paints the room blue.
No trace of lace on my body
No silk or satin waiting to be unwrapped
No tunes playing softly
Singing of a love that is not ours.
But in the blue light tonight
The mundane transforms into the magical.
Any lips against eager skin, perhaps would suffice
But the lips that spill stories in secret
Your ear eagerly swallows
The tongue that traces novellas
You devour breathlessly;
Now against your skin you find,
Tracing a love letter with words yet to be coined,
It does more than distract; completely erases
The constant buzz of 'not-good-enoughs',
All of it suddenly ceases.
Until all that is not right ceases to matter
All that matters is the way your nails
Trace ancient, long lost sigils on his skin
Awakening something divine or depraved underneath
Perhaps both simultaneously.
Strands of hair strewn about the bed
Sweat soaks up your dress,
Souvenirs on your shoulders and neck,
Swollen lips for a week;
distractedly you run your tongue over the remnants of the bite
And it tastes like the warm blue light.
This work has been published in Beetle Magazine's June 2020 Issue. Read the full issue here: https://issuu.com/beetlemag/docs/june2020
Illustration by Dhanashree Pimputkar