[Image Credits: Aashi Mehrotra]

By: Aashi Mehrotra

The natural world offers comparable reflections and paradigms to our seemingly natural way of living.  

Duck 

flip the pages cover 

to cover buy another

in a trance in a leash

for a duck in the aisle

ducks usually aren’t

in a suit and tie

a knot then two loops

to run fly swim through

the aisle 

The Chasm

they reside in the shade where 

the dark lives in day and 

the moths fly         unaware of time

the sun in the sky has no effect on light so 

the setting stays still no matter the crime

moths feast on the lies fed from poisonous leaves and 

work night and night without reprieve

the shock is palpable when wings are found

torn and discarded they rot on the ground 

ripped from bodies not unlike their own 

yet even as their buzzing shifts 

from laughs to whispers, silence to anger

the moths look down to hunt each other

in the zero-sum game they’re forced to live

it’s hardly realistic to just 

 It’s called law, It’s called structure, It’s called ‘order’

the bats pick them off and call it protection

  The weight of wings is too great a burden

    We manage the fall so you don’t face the chasm

they choose against their self-interests

they praise the noose as if it were bejeweled

              There are no walls here. Only the boundaries of common sense

And the leaves offer rest from a beating sun.

See our transparency? See your greed? 

so the moths don’t              and the moths believe 

An Open Cage

The unending sunrise bleeds the beat 

of a heart—a stopwatch whirrs to 

one but declines to echo
oblivion in the 

expanse of free will 

that won’t cease as 

the final

cage of 

now.