Bow-Kissed Plimsolls

By Jasmeet Dosanjh

crisp bite of nail

where i had placed my dandelion kiss

before 

the white spots starry shooted

down

the gullet of a milklorn, lovely, skinny young

thing. Thing because since the summer-eon with

you she has not been a person. Scarcely a lover.

A register of

apple-shaped wounds. Your bisleri bottle cap

somewhere in the slimy lacunae

of green ghost benches floating up, charged

with neurotic remembering. Then there is the sinking, which

cannot be avoided. Necks above the milk and beer swim.

There were stars in her cells 

during that chapter of you, 

time expanded, vanished

Her hair was lovely and set and tame without jelly. It was a 

nicotine happiness. Or the cola you injected in her

through dark kind moon-glowed eyes.

Lilly-lipped you took her 

in the dampness by the lake. That night you 

grew horns and were black as black. Black as

a mustang chipped against the erect

nipple of a midnight mistress.

That is where you opened/

Where you were already scraped before.

Moon-gravel between my thighs and your face frothing

dimpled like bark. Ceramic, dark. A spill

on my soft, shapeless, afloat nothing. That body you get to wear

between two lives. 

Ephyra-tender I had let you look into my loins still forming-

two flaps and a baby neptune. Cold and pure and sweet

as honeyed milk on a glacier. You had Budweiser, magnum in your veins. That

globe-hearted, wild liquor for dogs. You had wanted me 

with fur and nipples. And took me with the hook

of your teeth.

Orbicularity chiming. There was an Atlas here

once upon a dream on the dented slope

where womb flows into moon-charged bloom

Always, at midnight, there was chanting

your formless name just forming

You have been in my mouth since the pink-blue brick mosaic age

of school recess. Since the buttermilk and rose and soda

summer liquors of the first tender budding. Since

the age of first atoms. Since

a bulb on my ceramic chest osmotized into the primal

shaping of a bosom. I have milked your lyrics

before the words came through. My satellite static

extraterrestrial, pre-natural, pre-god.

In your poet’s voice, one skin, the knot of you and me,

you radiate- do dil kyu judte hai?

Why does a pair of hearts become one.

Why does a shelly knot of poison

find its antidote. The jelly-swim to your moon-chunk

tower. Gleaming blue-pink, blue-green, like a cold cigarette

under steam. I had cycled under the plasmic rain. You had egg

and sugar on your lips. Milk and honey your form. You had ecstatic fluff of

May’s last dandelion in your gym-damp hair. Your sex peeped through the balustrade,

singing, writhing. Everything was living in you, around you

(except for me, the milklorn concubine)

The ease of kissing over wine in tea-cups

grew gruesome. I was a beggar, a lyric caught between steel-petals

A loveliness lost, to her mother, her sister,

the bougainvillaea walk with starry lamps lining.

Constellations rearranged themselves from my private ascertained patterns

They had taken their names from me

You made hello from the balcony a whorish affair.

blinking lovely insults flaming tumbling through the lightning tunnel

seeking a blink of a girl, two bow-kissed plimsolls

abandoned

one powder-blue ribbon.

half lonely, spasming cell. Wet as wet.

By Jasmeet Dosanjh