Departure and arrival don’t exist in pairs
A bitter truth we know exists:
Nothing prepares me for your absence
except perhaps the battered window frames
rattling under the heaviness of storms.

A moment seeped in solitude and yet striving to exist
deep thrumming of stillness that exists in the
lone eye of the heron
as it sits still at the edge of loneliness,
waiting to take flight
away from the liquid eye of the swamp.

A thin line lost to the horizon
a dust road splitting in two
leaves me in contemplation
a cormorant diving to its death
bound by its incessant hunger.

A path turning into a debilitating question mark
bending around my house
chair on my porch reeks of past
while I slowly count my breaths
lost to the metronome of time.

Megha Sood is an Award-winning Asian-American Poet, Editor, and Literary Activist. Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine”, at Stanford University. Author of two chapbooks and two full-lengths including My Body Is Not and Apology, Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Full Length My Body Lives Like a Threat, FlowerSongPress,2022). Her co-edited anthology The Medusa Project has been selected to be sent to the moon as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA/SpaceX. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood