Poetry by Ankita Chatterjee

For You Blue

I pick through grass in the yard like a dog. 
I tell her in confidence I’m destined to make 
meaning from nothing. Her pride is splitting
her through in two; I flee from sight. 
That which I cannot control must be my own fault. 

Don’t look as I empty myself into
the hollow bowl of her ear. She tells me 
the future but only the bad. That cold 
slick feel in the heels of her gut comes in
round her ears and pulls her down. We’re growing 

like mangroves, rubbing dirt in our ears. When did 
I start to fear for her? It trickles 
down her neck, slow shame, dried
saltlike, a film of bodily terror. 
In the morning we sit and forget what the night brought. 




Salad Days

My rage, steel-toed, and you’re sobbing. The light 
slips and shatters from under your door. Through 
my fingers, just out of reach. I wish 
for a kind of learned deliverance I know 
will never come. And now I am afraid 
of forgetting these things I’d felt 
in the past, how the blood under my nails tasted the next
morning, how my stomach flipped. Oh but I want 
to be buried inside the moment, always. I grasp at 
a night on the roof with you, tapping ash onto 
the railing. Breathing you in then out. We listened 
to the nothing of the street and felt peaceful.




Silt

I’m walking uphill
when it starts in earnest. 
Things flood past before
I feel them, faces that gleam 
white and dissolve, gone, and I 
can never stitch my hands together
like a fisherman’s net and catch them
fast enough. I chance a moment 
without my umbrella. I examine 
my glossy reflection as 
it’s shattered by a car:
I’m surrounded 
by rivers. 




Makeover

I was so alone today that 
I cut my own hair with a 
pair of scalloped scissors
tucked away the gore in 
a plastic bag and felt no one 
would notice my digression 
my mother had a fringe 
over her high forehead 
like a helmet of soft velvet 
until one day she unfurled and 
it seemed she had never hidden not 
once I walk now with half of 
my expressions veiled I am sick 
of having a face

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Ankita Chatterjee is a student at UC Berkeley whose work has appeared most recently in Barren Magazine. In her free time, she daydreams. 

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