Celina Bagchi '24
imagine:
two specks, bright against the lonely night sky
swaying, as ceramic cheeks crack and
luminous eyes meet in the dark. i’m sorry, i
wonder if i will ever belong to that high school
in the movies, with the girls who listen
to cigarettes after sex and smoke joints out
the window of your jeep wrangler, promising
to stay together after the bonds of suburbia break and
they escape this tired town.
imagine:
paint on a wall of canvas; i am
the painter trying desperately
to capture your ineffable beauty, your
aura of permanence. i look in the mirror
but i don’t know who stares back; she’s
a withering lily, backlit by smoke pouring
out of the top of a bottle of patron we can’t afford,
crystal glasses replacing a copper pot of kofte
that was once home to everything
we thought we’d ever need.
imagine:
acrylic paints, bolder than the words that leave my lips but
once you strike the canvas, you can never
take it back, so i paint us as
animals instead of humans, something less perfect
and less permanent. i’m sorry i can’t paint your smile
as pretty as it looks in the dark before me; i’m sorry
my love is only as alive as the stars in the sky above you.
my paintbrush turns the curve
of your neck into a hummingbird’s plume, standing
out against the foliage of the forest we made our home.
imagine:
us, waiting for the november flowers to bloom. waiting
for my crimes to catch up to me. waiting
for you to say that perhaps we are all animals, but
to look and laugh as you do is all i want, and i promise
to scatter my soul like newspaper clippings
in your childhood bedroom
long after you’ve left for college, and i promise
that someday, the marks i make on this canvas
might mean something
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