I roamed in Vienna for a month because the place was good company | To keep while reading Siddhartha & every evening an onrush of scenery would eat into my blood | And make its flow mercurial as the Ferris wheel went up & down | An old woman knit a white cardigan for me & made a patch of yellow sunflowers on its bottom-left | “Keep it”, she had said, “You might need it for when the days grow colder.” | Half-stuck by unseasonal lightning at noon, I stood by the shade of a tin roof & watched trees grow dense as leaves brushed off dust | Dirt mingled with rain ran straight toward gutters | Over the skyline, Baroque buildings exclaimed joint muzzles of rain-water trickle down their spines| Once the rain was over I went to the Cemetery of the Unnamed | To spend time with fresh dew on grass & squirrels beside shrubs bearing wild-fruit | At evening I watch dandelions flake its wings to the wind | Here memory is an anecdote to temporality | I roamed in Vienna for a month because the place was good company | & by place I mean the landscape | of memory: | uninhabited churches | & the fennel-smell of grass | & bookstores with hardbound covers | & flowers that braid their color into your skin | & the sun on my calves every morn | & silhouettes of people with open umbrellas, blackening, under twilight | & corners to finish reading.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her poem “At Dusk With the Gods” won the Alfaaz (Kalaage) prize. Her work has been published in Quiddity, Ann Arbor Review, Rise Up Review and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and loves horses, dictionaries of forgotten languages, blue oceans, and autumn.
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