Lover Tongue by Arundhathi Subramaniam
Perhaps I will tire of your grammar,
find myself yearning
for the rumble of verb or the soft flesh of pure vowel
on those mornings when I stumble over your landscape
of unforgiving nouns.
And it’s possible I will whittle away the very ribcage
in which I once sought sanctuary,
gnaw at the unbending sinew of ancestral norm,
sulk,
turn sophomoric,
say fuck you,
say cope up,
just to disrupt
your family symmetries your patrician DNA.
Maybe I will simply
want something more
one day
than your bequest of semicolons - something more final,
more silent.
But even if I turn the page before you do,
remember I am as dog-eared,
soiled,
puzzled,
as you are,
and as much in love. Art by Kellen Hatanaka
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Meet the death-defying teenage train surfers of Mumbai
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