Priyank Pillai
Crocus
Sometimes my kiss is the snowfall on a frozen lake,
healing what is left behind after young figure skaters
return home, their tendons aching with the phantom
pain of ambitions forgone to life’s knowing embrace.
Tonight your gaze makes me wonder how summer
is possible, how the crocus can bloom despite the bustle
of an unforgiving city where our bruised hearts intertwined
for the first time in our desperate anti-intellectualism.
I will leave the nightlight on so they shall not smell
the fear acuminating under the foliage of what the law
was still too shy to call a marriage, our blossoming
deferred until the horizon is wounded by light.
Tomorrow you will smile for me, bravely, as you have
from our photographs these past fifteen years, knowing
that our bodies will touch again in passionate geometries,
and never revealing to history the illicitness of our survival.
Priyank Pillai is a trans poet and conceptual artist currently based in Houston, TX. Their previous works have appeared in queer South Asian publications such as Gaysi, Orinam, and Pink Pages. Their first North American writings are forthcoming in the Spring 2016 issue of the Minetta Review.
This poem is not previously published.