ANANNYA UBEROI - POEMS

Anannya Uberoi (she/her) is a full-time software engineer and part-time tea connoisseur based in Madrid. She previously won Ayaskala Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Writing Month challenge, and was nominated for Best of Net in 2020. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bangalore Review, The Loch Raven Review, Deep Wild Journal, Lapis Lazuli, and Tipton Poetry Journal.  She spends her Sundays in tearooms working as a columnist for The Remnant Archive.
www.anannyauberoi.com
Credit photo: Tanya Shrivastava

A Homeward Letter
​

​Mother, I am well.
The city's gardens are a mild aphrodisiac
to grey winter mornings adding turmoil
in my tea pot, flower pot, storm stirring
in my backyard of things.


The evenings come with
secret hunts of flies; I often mull over events
on the headlines and hide tiny wasps in the slip
of my tongue, the earl grey dissolving
in the corners of my bones.


School is grandiose –
I still break into poetry in the first paragraph
of my essays; I think I'm growing to be
a fine lawyer. The snow does not taste soft
or delicious like back home; it is heavy
and jumps on my skin, reiterating secrets
of an urban sky.
 
Vera is,
of course, an antidote to my impending dip
into insanity. She and I are lonely, and more recently,
I observed her cheeks color up like petunias
in the vapid winter. Sometimes, I tell her
by parapraxis, of course, how the parsnips
of your farm simmered my solitude with sound,


how the beaming carpets
of your room colored my own.

Night Lights
​

​The moon is mine.
It is sitting globe-like
on the corners of my lampshade,
and I feel no difference –
it could have been a small bulb,
for instance, or a soft fire glow
buzzing around the corners of my room.
It is nothing special, this cupped moon
on my side table, I am deriving
its soft light to my own quiet purposes
in this sense of oblique belonging
of the night to the night, everything
stretched back into a single thread
of light and longing, longer with
the distance between myself and the sky,
wrapped into a tiny concentrated box
within this room.
I pull out a sheet to draw,
the silence becomes an edge somewhere,
a distant barking dog a curve around it,
a solo traveler who flew to the moon
so often it became an object
of friendly coexistence.
 

 

​Clockwork
 

​In a wild dream I am kissing you.
The clock is going backward to contain
as much time it can before it is ten.
We are fighting for survival. The window
outside is switching seasons – flowers,
sun, snow; I suddenly lock my legs with
yours lest the Christmas wind blows
into my skirt. The white curtain is lined
golden in one moment, silver-grey
in another, in a floundering meditation
of the limpid light and color show outside
paces gently on your face, marking
creases on your cheek. Your room is a
throbbing territory of time, lasting
seven seasons and a month. The clock is
gracefully back at ten. You are perkily
considering not going at all, I, making
lemon juice to revive our parched lips.

Landscape
​

Your eyes are the result of moonlight whisked
       in chocolate violas, releasing
flurries in the upward sky as you observe the stars,
       your mouth breathing a crescent smile
into a puffed up, procellous twirl of clouds stretched
out in a corner. Your lips, a history of highlands
       constructed with you, red hollyhocks
I wear in my hair so beamingly, feet on the grass
        proud of foxtails in the summertime.
 
It is as if I plucked a pearl afloat on sea froth
to have learned your name, swam nine feet
         hence to have said hello,
touched the sea bed with my bare toes
to have called you mine –
          save it all happened fortuitously
and now I am missing a pearl I so miraculously
plucked out of nowhere