Blue bardo: a zuihitsu
3:00 a.m. My eyeballs burn.
I stare at the ceiling thinking
of the Hope Diamond.
The lab-grown stones in my jewelry box are benign—
the color of lagoons, of cast-off identities.
Not precious like hope or nursing curses.
Just a reminder of my unholiness.
// The blue-winged parakeets come to life in the Portia trees at dawn.
Her last breath escapes her nostrils. The body begins its steady forgetting.
What I remember most clearly are her lips. How death always begins at the cupid’s bow. How
the pallor spills over her wrinkles
like a fountain—
a gurgle of grey.
// I slip out the window and tiptoe to the rock pools in the moonlight.
A scorpion joins me at its edge, its jaws studded with dew.
I gather blue lotuses. Hymns pollinate the air.
Water freezes in jagged lines
like a smashed mirror.
Seven years of misfortune follow.
// When I was seven, my friend invited me home to see his new Siamese fighting fish. It swirled
around the Java moss like a glamorous alien, fanning its skirt of cornflower tulle, the undisputed
emperor of the five-foot tank. Then someone gave him a pair of guppies for his birthday. He
slipped them into the aquarium. Minutes later the tank became a graveyard of scales.
// In my last memory of her, she is crushing saskatoon berries in a fruit press.
Pectin, sugar, cinnamon, and water come to a sputtering boil.
Her jam is lustrous—inky and full-bodied
with an aftertaste of almonds.
// At a dollar store in the city, I buy a tube of grey-blue paint.
Frost Blue.
The color of lifeless lips.
// A birthmark ripples down my right arm, shoulder to elbow
in a ribbon of jam-packed pixels.
In my origin story, I imagine myself as an extra-terrestrial
stamped with the map of a distant dust cloud. The Butterfly Nebula.
A fortune teller once told me it is an imprint from a past life. A reptilian one.
I begin to hear hissing in astral projections.
I worry I am becoming cold-blooded.
// Once, in winter, I stood outside a stone igloo—a temple housing the origin of a sacred river in
the Himalayas. No one tells you how sugary and pearlescent snow is in the sun. How it makes a
whole valley convulse into existence. How the ice drip feeds the river new corpuscles. How
everything becomes a mountain of light.
// I was taught to count using an abacus. Numbers grew steadily nebulous. Someday, when I
have a daughter, I will teach her to count in morpho butterflies.
// On the ultrasound, the mulberry is suspiciously still.
It hangs like a weighted comma in the star-studded static.
There is no viable heartbeat.
There is no way to sugarcoat this.
// She used to tell me I was the Kohinoor when I smiled. Come on, peel your lips back fully, my love.
A good smile must tingle your ears. Your laughter must sound like xylophones.
I am not allowed to be sad. Blue is inauspicious—both as color and feeling.
We always smile.
The women in our family always smile.
No matter what happens to us.
// The scorpion sting on my skin is raised in copper sulfate rings.
The tincture in the vial grows cloudy as I dress my bruises in flowers—Viper’s bugloss.
// 6:00 a.m. Dawn streaks the east in blue diamonds.
I think of the artist who leapt into the void:
“At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.” *
_____
*quote by Yves Klein
I stare at the ceiling thinking
of the Hope Diamond.
The lab-grown stones in my jewelry box are benign—
the color of lagoons, of cast-off identities.
Not precious like hope or nursing curses.
Just a reminder of my unholiness.
// The blue-winged parakeets come to life in the Portia trees at dawn.
Her last breath escapes her nostrils. The body begins its steady forgetting.
What I remember most clearly are her lips. How death always begins at the cupid’s bow. How
the pallor spills over her wrinkles
like a fountain—
a gurgle of grey.
// I slip out the window and tiptoe to the rock pools in the moonlight.
A scorpion joins me at its edge, its jaws studded with dew.
I gather blue lotuses. Hymns pollinate the air.
Water freezes in jagged lines
like a smashed mirror.
Seven years of misfortune follow.
// When I was seven, my friend invited me home to see his new Siamese fighting fish. It swirled
around the Java moss like a glamorous alien, fanning its skirt of cornflower tulle, the undisputed
emperor of the five-foot tank. Then someone gave him a pair of guppies for his birthday. He
slipped them into the aquarium. Minutes later the tank became a graveyard of scales.
// In my last memory of her, she is crushing saskatoon berries in a fruit press.
Pectin, sugar, cinnamon, and water come to a sputtering boil.
Her jam is lustrous—inky and full-bodied
with an aftertaste of almonds.
// At a dollar store in the city, I buy a tube of grey-blue paint.
Frost Blue.
The color of lifeless lips.
// A birthmark ripples down my right arm, shoulder to elbow
in a ribbon of jam-packed pixels.
In my origin story, I imagine myself as an extra-terrestrial
stamped with the map of a distant dust cloud. The Butterfly Nebula.
A fortune teller once told me it is an imprint from a past life. A reptilian one.
I begin to hear hissing in astral projections.
I worry I am becoming cold-blooded.
// Once, in winter, I stood outside a stone igloo—a temple housing the origin of a sacred river in
the Himalayas. No one tells you how sugary and pearlescent snow is in the sun. How it makes a
whole valley convulse into existence. How the ice drip feeds the river new corpuscles. How
everything becomes a mountain of light.
// I was taught to count using an abacus. Numbers grew steadily nebulous. Someday, when I
have a daughter, I will teach her to count in morpho butterflies.
// On the ultrasound, the mulberry is suspiciously still.
It hangs like a weighted comma in the star-studded static.
There is no viable heartbeat.
There is no way to sugarcoat this.
// She used to tell me I was the Kohinoor when I smiled. Come on, peel your lips back fully, my love.
A good smile must tingle your ears. Your laughter must sound like xylophones.
I am not allowed to be sad. Blue is inauspicious—both as color and feeling.
We always smile.
The women in our family always smile.
No matter what happens to us.
// The scorpion sting on my skin is raised in copper sulfate rings.
The tincture in the vial grows cloudy as I dress my bruises in flowers—Viper’s bugloss.
// 6:00 a.m. Dawn streaks the east in blue diamonds.
I think of the artist who leapt into the void:
“At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.” *
_____
*quote by Yves Klein
September 2025
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Australian artist and poet of South Indian heritage. Her poetry has been nominated thrice for the Pushcart Prize, and multiple times for the Best of the Net. She won the 66th Moon Prize awarded by Writing in a Woman’s Voice Journal, and the Winged Muse's Writing Contest in March 2025. She is the author of Patchwork Fugue (Atomic Bohemian Press UK, 2024), A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys (winner of The Little Black Book Competition, Hedgehog Poetry Press UK, 2024), and three digital micro-chaps books published by Origami Poems Project (US). Her art has been featured on the covers and within the pages of several literary journals and anthologies including West Trestle Review, Amsterdam Quarterly Yearbook, and Pithead Chapel (US) She lives and works in Lindfield, on traditional Gammeragal land. Find her on X @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings
Art: Ellen June Wright, Diptych #1306, #1509, watercolor on paper