Grief is sometimes a pair of oversized trousers. I put my legs in and all air presses upward.

The moon is a feminist. She’s showing me her round belly, pregnant with herself, glowing. Fullness, she tells me, is powerful.

Be called to wild places; gather names,      welcome flowers—beside           the road, through cracks in sidewalks— miracles on a wooded trail. Pay rapt attention. Treasure

Maybe the rippled surface of the lake is a gateway to stars in a different sky, and maybe the probing of pike nosing through roe

Hints of flesh in the forgery of flesh, a habitat of deconstructed trucks, rusted in a mud-slaked parking lot: all that is not submitted to

Your smile as wide as weeds, not dandelion, not wish gone to seed. but buffalo burr, pretty as it is noxious, stinging spines beneath vibrant

I’ve looked out of rain-washed windows and wept over an impossible love.

When he climbed upon the bed, sated, summertime; memories of his unusually long life didn’t render him shade —

you have it in your bone, a penchant for relevancy. we talk a, b, c and d. you are a wall, we don’t go to e.

I reread the same paragraph three times each time convinced it’s different

All the pages hidden in all the forests Await a word that will remain When the trees are gone. And now?

When you came downstairs for a glass of water, what were you thinking while standing at the kitchen sink observing the world? What does anyone think in the last moments of their life?

Our story is a window. Stroke by stroke my body remembers that life & cries for the missing parts of itself

I am not sad I can’t see the blue of your iris, that a shadow obscures

and only I know how their hair curls almost scentless around their ears, what kind of silence pleases them.

I may be soggy with sleep and the wispy, leftover fragrance of night jasmine, but let me be luminous. Strut with the fawns.

Sometimes it takes just the right window. With enough sunshine, and not too much water.

C. P. Surendran gives us three poems from his new book, Window With a Train Attached from Speaking Tiger.

But I don’t have to say a word to the trees. They already know everything.

TBR brings you two poems from Kunjana Parashar's debut poetry book They Gather Around Me, the Animals.