Shaleen Rakesh

 (1)   Drinking river rot until it tastes like ink, watching cobalt sparks strike against twilight. rags in weeds, behind the cataract-clouded eye, he is molting— shedding the skin of poet, son, failure, to become a blue-throated god; ruling kingdoms of mud and stars. The river an open vein across land’s gray wrist, clotted with plastic prayers of the city upstream.   where the earth is most wounded, knees pressed into the fertile loam he is rooted—a gnarled extension of the bank. a heavy glass sun in his palm, pulsing with a cheap, amber mercy thins the blood until it can flow uphill, back to the headwaters of youth.   Then, the first rupture. A kingfisher arrives—a blue stitch sewing the sky to the scum-slicked water. Then another. A water family gathering, in the hushed reeds.   They see a stone that breathes, a silent sentinel in the theater   a ride on a sudden down-stroke a hitchhiker on a sapphire wing. ...

​ The sky, circling in blue and orange has turned into an alchemist? Elias has stopped trying to name it. Orange into blue into something that has no colour yet, the colour of light that arrives near the end of things and seems to know it, seems to be watching back, in greys. Elias keeps walking. This is the whole discipline now — to keep walking under a sky of vapid judgment and not turn away  and not explain yourself to anyone, not even to yourself, specially not to yourself not anymore. We are not the rational creators we tell ourselves we are. We do not choose towards joy. We choose away from the face we are afraid to meet later — the older self standing at the back of every room we ever entered, arms folded, already knowing how it ends. Elias chose some things for that reason. The safe harbor. The door not opened. The words not spoken on an evening in another city that he can still locate exactly in his body thirty years later. He was trying to protect himself from regret. He ...