AYESHA CHATTERJEE
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
NAPOLEON'S VIOLETS
Napoleon’s violets return to France each year—eh bien! I’m skimming the news, looking for rubber ducks or planets. No. No purple blood in these pages. But in France, there’s beauty after mutilation, spreading even before the trees have stirred, death delicately undone. I FORGET LIKE A GOLDFISH
I forget like a goldfish that the time is twelve thirty-five just past noon or after midnight. In the mirror a girl who is not me wears a peach swimsuit and stares through a circled sun at a point above her head. I opt for chandeliers of upturned bottles fighting light with rust and the time is still twelve thirty-five. Now I know spring can be condensed into something amber like a letter: my dear sir, I am writing to remind you—I am SO sorry—that even screen figures are real when you add a third dimension. Concentrate on the act of elimination to arrive at your answer. Cross out the stars. Twelve thirty-five. Politely, a gull in a grey suit waits for the light to change before she struts to the other side, and tourists stop to watch. The only sun is in the mirror captured in metal. A blue rabbit crouches in a square. There is cake and rain and he will build an house and it will be forever. Again I forget not to look at the time. SULPHUR SUN
Fractured, aching, the house shakes every time a train goes by. What colour is sulphur? Does it hurt? The sun constrains it to unstable lightness, a final destination, beauty. At home, we raise the plastic branches of a 12-inch pine, count the layered cotton smoothed like fur. Some incidents may or may not have happened. Families are like that. |
Born and raised in Kolkata, India, AYESHA CHATTERJEE has lived in England, the USA and Germany, and now calls Toronto home. Her poetry has appeared in several magazines including nthposition, Autumn Sky Poetry, The Guardian online, Magma Poetry as well as being featured by the (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Her first collection The Clarity of Distance was published in 2011 by Calgary-based Bayeux Arts. She is currently President of the League of Canadian Poets.
