Four Poems, Sneha Mohidekar

 seal-skin

skin in/side means

viscera/l lee-side protects

interstitials buttoned/interstitial

buttons protect

the biting wind/she

eats/the skin off her lips

eats her lips eats her skin

enamel enables

whispering/requires the means

to close your mouth

cut fruit

she douses her hands in orange juice

pretends it’s blood

pretends to have slayed a giant, harvested its heart

pretends the empty chambers are whisper galleries

pretends to hear secrets, technically articulated

pretends they’ll slip on a technicality

pretends that was the question

she sucks blood off her teeth

pretends it’s orange juice

or, doesn’t pretend—

preens

end of the world as we knew it 

the fish are tilting at windmills

the pigs have bulked up and backwards and sprouted feathers

like a dinosaur, or a chicken

we stay inside and watch

and try to keep our siblings from escaping out the bathroom window

to tilt their heads back and stick their tongues out and close their eyes

trying to catch scraps of sky

falling as brown-bottle sea-glass

the atmosphere is fracturing along ley lines and 

we were wrong about them

(their placement not

their existence)

all the perforations in the earth

(oil wells, water wells, well, well, well)

are singing best of the 2000s

I can hear you harmonizing

one of your sisters asks if we can go get milkshakes

my brother asks if he can drive

he isn't licensed, though, I remind him

and he laughs so hard I think he's folded his lungs into origami shapes

shooting star, airplane, butterfly

when we leave the drive-thru, I have a foot out the window

and one and a half fingers on the steering wheel—

my body has become liminal

you have an arm and half your torso out the window

reaching to pet the wind's soundwaves

you raise your whole chest to ask me

voice curling gentle between the cupholders and the gearshift

will it hurt

I pretend not to hear over the sound of the smog ripping into composite parts 

you don’t ask again

our siblings are in the back

they're so big

expanding into the space and then expanding it

they're making shapes out of the clouds

and dripping hamburger juice onto my seats

in/set

the cartographer draws

fractals and eats them

the wind brings her erosion

the cartographer carves her face

of the cliff with her maps of the cliff

hangs reality on record

there is salt in the water

and in the wind and in the way

displacement is a vector and

is loadbearing caves walled in water

carry the cliff

Sneha Mohidekar (she/her) reads poetry theory and queer space operas on the train. Her work can be found in The Indianapolis Review and Ghost City Review.