by Ellen Kombiyll
Ma absent
in her three-day trance.
The garden didn’t
burn she says
then all day stares
at the television.
Perhaps the game show host
repeats the cue:
Name something specific
that has an anchor.
Is the correct
answer loss
when speaking
metaphorically?
Like pinecones in a fire
burst, reviving earth,
scarred seeds burrow
& wait for water.
My name
means flight
which is what I know.
Or, like a tarantula
escapes glass walls
to one day climb
the rocky precipice
of a waterfall—
carapace cast off
among ferns shaking
taffeta skirts, the strut
of escargot—O
the wild
yes
of silk slips
trailing silver—
is it love?
Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work appears in New Ohio Review, the minnesota review, Nimrod, and Ploughshares. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, an Academy of American Poets college prize, and the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She co-founded of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora.
