Cardiophobia
I.
How grief sharpens its tooth,
unbearable I am to myself.
My father, a deep cavity,
I have lost blood.
Can you understand
what I have lost
is his blood.
Everyone is dying,
except for me
and it is only July.
II.
Perhaps prayer is nothing more than a statement of intention.
What I wanted for him and what God intended
were two very different things.
This I cannot forgive.
I have lost so much more than my father.
I have lost his father and his father and his.
It is endless, this genotype of fatherlessness.
What he lived and lost,
now I must live.
III.
With a wail I opened my mouth,
like a whale I swallowed my father’s body.
But it is hard to live like a parasite
pleading with a dead heart.
So every night,
I run screaming out of my body.
I am still waiting to be fed on,
still waiting
for my grand whalefall.
Difference
I do not envy
these creatures
their blind need.
Like Oedipus,
one hand on a needle
and one on his steed
galloping to his gallows.
These pleasures
of fascism
Heads so close
to the ground
benefaction costs them air,
swallowing allows
them to turn
from the gallows.
Faithless, I
look to the skyward.
To the ones who grow antlers,
grow hooves,
and pain —
brewing dissent
till their bones
fracture.
They give up this pleasure.
They cannot drink.
They cannot grieve.
Still, we all forage and graze
in these same blood pastures.
Karuna Chandrashekar is a psychoanalytic therapist currently living in Bangalore. Her work has been published in LaLit, Anomalylit, JaggeryLit, Eunoia Review, The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia and more.