HUNGER
What spans of time work for you
haven’t you spent enough on mistakes
you thought were necessities?
Think again how little is necessary to
start making up necessities of our own design.
How long will you look at dark and cry little whines for the night,
How long will you set alight mirrors with your right appearances.
When will you realize
you have both dark of night
and light of cold summer ice?
I am waiting for you
when you decide to live towards your self
bound in leaps to giving you rest
rest as the right sacrifice:
you must be ready
to change the ready-made bed,
to walk into new rooms
to make them yours.
Kick with your two dirty feet:
you have to break into your casket
and steal
who you want to be
yourself.
My hunger has
woken up. What does not
feed
can leave.
LANGUAGE BARRIER
My eyes have a foreign accent
in the way
they speak to yours:
Can you be everything
on the surface
tonight? I will speak
softly
to anger,
yours and mine.
It has been a while
since any of us
have felt touched. I can handle
the displeasure
of not seeing
myself in the mirror.
I thrive in places
that need my absence.
Yes, I can handle it
during the day. But at night
the same news breaks:
The truth is always
so insufficient,
isn’t it?
Speak a lullaby to me
so I can forget my mind
for tonight.
It has been a long evening,
and I hear
the morning
will be dark as a morgue.
We may as well start to settle in.
Avleen K Mokha holds a B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics from McGill University. She is the 2019 winner of McGill’s Peterson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing. Avleen’s work has appeared in journals such Déraciné Magazine, Yolk Literary, and Siblini. Avleen edits poetry and prose for Persephone’s Daughters, a literary magazine devoted to survivors of abuse. Presently, Avleen works as a journalist in Montreal and focuses on covering under-reported communities. Her first poetry chapbook, DREAM FRAGMENTS, is forthcoming this autumn by Cactus Press.
