Two Poems
Abhinav Aradhi
Chlorine
To breath is to belabor oneself
With a notion of importance, and
Do you truly lack humility
To such a staggering degree?
Look inwards, and then at your
Visage, and you’ll learn quickly the
Demerits of your existence, the pitfalls
Of your pratfall life, oh, you’ll feel it then,
Like when I dragged my sister
Out of a drowning grave at a waterpark,
And I felt like a Savior, and now I wonder
If it really mattered at all.
And was it really me, who saved her,
Or was it my hands and feet independent?
And why can I not prevent things from
Occurring, before they ever leave the station?
And this reminds me of when I nearly drowned
In a big pool at a Chicago gated community,
And I felt fear and life and water, and it was
Then that I questioned the reality of meaning.
And I wade, heretofore, and I must confess,
To the Fates and their yarn by the pool edge,
That I still don’t know how to swim.
Crickets
Papa says i’m a good-for-nothing,
and i like swimming in the creek,
when the woods are at a serene terror, and Mama hasn’t beaten the
dust out of my shorts quite yet.
Mama twirls my hair sometimes in wood-rotted hands, and she whispers like a breeze,
and she and I sometimes live in the palatial and in that thing she calls a dream.
and she and I sometimes cry somewhere between the worn-oak door and the crawl
space beneath the creaking porch seats.
and he comes swimming around here sometimes. i think he’s a nymph or something.
his hair reminds me of summer up at Niagara, where Papa said to me,
you’re the strangest child I ever seen.
and his skin is ghostly, but I think he’s all kinds of real,
because he smiles,
and my skin gets all tingly,
and the trees hang entirely still, not daring to make
a sound, the pindrop sensation only burst by the soft, silken, ambrosia of his
gentle wading, back and forth, to and from me.
boy, i yell like Papa,
and he grins like whiplash, and he’s atop me,
and we’re writhing, and he’s drowning me in crashing waves against
my lips, and he’s a nymph and I’m the one lured into the
swirling vortex of he.
My nymph, he and I understand
fervor out there in the creek, down the dirt trail
past where Papa likes to whistle and wipe down
the old rifle he says
seems to keep trouble
far from company.
Abhinav Aradhi hails from Cranbury, New Jersey. He expects to graduate in 2027. He writes, “All of my poetry comes from a personal place, or a feeling I want to draw on. The ideas for what I write come to me like blurs, and once I have the idea concretely in mind, I let it all sort of spill onto the paper. A little about me: I’m 20 at the moment, I love watching Big Brother & Survivor, and I’m a massive fan of Nintendo games. My favorite book series of all time is Nancy Drew.”