Shrishti Khanna
My kid asks, Do you like cats, miss?
I think about the cat I killed, no, the cab killed, in our frantic rush to get somewhere anywhere away from here. So much blood on the road, you could swim in a sea of viscous red and the pain would keep you afloat. My kid asks, Can you swim, miss? and before I respond, he shows me how. He frantically paces back and forth and moves his arms in an apple shape. I take that to mean, do whatever you can and come up for air, miss. I’ve been thinking about grey cats left to die on the curb and maybe today we are in the cab and we aren’t window people. My mother that day could not stop crying, so we came back for the cat, searched for its limp red body and apologised to fur through the night. I think about kindness without return and a shell of my mother’s borrowed grace that keeps my arms frantically moving when the lights are red and the lights are always red in this city. Counting them has kept me afloat in cabs on trafficked roads. Reach out and you could run away & out into the world & back to your drunk father. My lover travels every day to another town just to get to work and always returns home. So much for food on the table but it is a serious thing to return. I have been kissing children on their heads, I hear James telling me to return and he has been dead thirty years. You were right James, you cannot tell the children there is no hope. All the children I’ve been are roadkill on the curb. Suppose you pick up your palms, cotton their eyes deep enough. They can’t dream the same dreams I do. I do like cats and children and their soft heads.
Shrishti Khanna is an Indian artist and poet. She believes, as Audre Lorde wrote, that poetry is not a luxury, but a necessity. She writes around a central sentiment that surfaces in themes of childhood, trauma, grief, women, motherhood, and the small showers we try to take every day. She believes everything else is made up, which is to say, everything is written down. Her poems will appear in upcoming issues of MoonLit Getaway and Suburban Witchcraft.