WE SURVIVED, AS WE DID by Aditi Nagrath

How can I testify now
that I am saved, across the water,
the other end?
I made it
with my hours
clenched in fists.

Damn your wisdom
and its poison. It’s enough
that I am whole,
here at last–

the poem is proof.

Its shimmering screen, its dissection of grief:
a marathon of stages
I have clawed through since

but now you beg me to forget it all,
to remember you without
speaking of it.

I obey your absence,
I break and maul; I destroy
the kitchen, myself, the bed.

For you, I learn
the art of staying dead.

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Poetry at Sangam