by Karan Kapoor
Poetry
“Everything is punished by your absence.”
– Li-Young Lee
has no name.
It answers to your silence.
Your mouth is the door
to the city. Strangers leave and enter, rub
their feet clean at its teeth. You walk,
the long arms of the city waver.
You move cities, the city moves cities.
I need to rip out your forest
and plunge in it. Rain deluges
the city, you drip.
The city weeps when your dam
of loneliness breaks. I blow over you.
The city does not weep, I weep into the city.
I want to flee the city and inhabit you.
Longing thickens the air like a kiss
with only tongue—no breath or lip.
Without your lungs, the city’s air chokes us.
Your exhale is the airfield the city’s crows go
to be lost. I am hungry for your map,
your snow, the blankets inside your wine bottles.
The city is punished by your absence. No, I forget,
the city does not care. I char in your absence.
The city awakens as I break open
to your dream—a river slaughtering a bridge.
I want to live
where you live, either the windiest
city or the one with the coldest colors.
You belong to two cities, I belong
to none. I am a dog who loves your shelter. I bark
at shadows, ravenous for the banquet of your palms.
Can a song or a sonnet be a city?
A city can be a poem. You are
the metro lines of my fingertips,
the highways on my wrists.
the asphalt of my scalp,
the cosmopolis of my tongue.
You are the unfathomable distance
between the city in which I love
and the one in which I don’t.
Karan Kapoor is the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS. Their poems have appeared in Best New Poets, AGNI, Shenandoah, North American Review, and elsewhere. They’re on the editorial board of Alice James Books. (www.karankapoor.net)