Red cauliflower flowers wither,
soft craters in the freckled chart
of space

In the chair, I am placed, a frozen word. I’ve peeled a different layer of quiet. The sun whistles, a mad raven on the doorstep. I invite it only in parts, tiny cockroaches of rays crawl up my thigh, throw bubbles of spit over the ingrown hairs. My friend says that sunlight will kill the lair of germs in my bones, the half-body that continually sleeps.

I read many poems on illness this year. It brings the strangest of uneasiness; I wonder what it must be to think of illness as a stranger, an intruder. In my bed, there are plates and plates of wood furrowed with the smell of pills. It roams in my scalp and pecks my neck. The body is a cave, insects crawling—  life slithering, crawling, living, breathing in its innate inability to know otherwise. It is a fat locust.— Dancing, dancing, twirling endlessly, and illness is as soft as the pillow from childhood, the Nivea cream, the white homemade butter. It draws me into its arms and whispers of its fondness as everything else tenderly diffuses, as everyone else, step by step, takes leave. All grow from fat shapes to silhouettes.

In my chair, I’ve acquired a different kind of quiet. I feel the temples of each leaf around me, trying to survive the cyst cold.

Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer and visual artist whose work has been published in The Night Heron Barks, Silver Birch Press, Selcouth Station, and Poetry at Sangam among others. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017, shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award 2018 and nominated for the Best of the Net.