I Stand Austere as Time Runs Free

[Andy Warhol, Untitled (Oxidation Painting), 1978.]

By: Aashi Mehrotra

Amid creeping life changes that feel world-ending, and coursework overloads that snatch at free time, replacing it only with oppressive writer’s block and melancholy, come three rusty poems.

Pristine Patina
The world keeps changing
too fast for me to keep
the fistful of memories now
considered relics of time past.

I’m scared it’ll all end before
I get the chance to wrinkle
or rot or become a sprinkle
in the ocean tides that’ll end too.

For appearances’ sake, with no body
to witness, I want to die painted in patina.
Make it look like I lived long and long ago,
and didn’t die with the Earth.

Notion Paused My Emotional Growth
To write well, must I breathe grief?
Must I impale myself on a spear,
Odin-style, and cry out poetry?
Are mere happenings not enough
anymore, or is it stagnation that inhibits
me now? It seems I’m on house arrest
and without a car to take my creative freedom
somewhere new. I wake up each day at my desk,
hands cuffed to a calendar of identical days.
Oh, but for a grand finale on how to be vulnerable,
written from the heart, I will confess
I have no more to tell, no new moments
I haven’t stripped and sold the emotions from
in rations for these bland mornings of instant coffee.

A Love Letter to “The Orange”
After sending “The Orange” to my collection
of poems that used to make me happy,
and after I thank Wendy Cope in earnest,
I shove my nail into the pith of my own orange,
until it comes out sticky and covered
in white veins that I bite off my thumb
in a desire to love ordinary things,
again.