Elegy

I smell a ripe jackfruit and my childhood spills out of my fingers as music. Mornings, I wake up thirsty recalling remnants of dreams where the wolves live, summer through winter and time becomes a house I move in and out of. There is no milk in the fridge, only prophecies that no one dares decipher. How do I whittle what surfaces inside of me. My heart, a herd of deer, flitting through the forest of hands. Fleeing from what it knows is there but has yet not seen. Hooves hurrying, soft and light, only on a hunch. The lines keep collapsing and my father turns opaque  as the distant Himalayas at dusk. Mute, immoveable. Snow falls and falls until the sky too is pinned in place by the hallowed hands of white. Someone is always leaving us for the light. And they who I love keep blooming back through frozen soil. Every year, I wait for them to bring language back to me.

 September 2025

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Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer whose work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Lunch Ticket Magazine, Evocations Review, Sky Island Journal, Solstice Magazine and elsewhere. Most recently, her poems have received Honorable Mention for the Paul Violi Prize, nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for The Prose Poem’s Spring Short Prize. She is a TIN House alum and holds an MFA from The New School.

Art:  Ellen June Wright, Diptych #1306,  #1509, watercolor on paper