All in by Ellen Kombiyil

by Ellen Kombiyil

with two lines from Bernadette Mayer

 

 

On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.

For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.

Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind

arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk

I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes—
When I say the man I don’t mean my father.

Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,

arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant—
Is that him I just passed?

I don’t like cooking dinner,
get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.

“I have to send my meeting notes out in the morning,” he says;
I stir fry the tofu-slash-get distracted

by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.

In another place or through window tint
it appears to be raining on asphalt.

Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other

like flamingos on takeoff or just before dancing,
each of us moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.

Little Dot move left;
Little Dot don’t move just blink in vertical space

going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.

Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed
like night scenes, streaming taillights, headlights

the signal’s shifting red-green;
or we flicker like flamingos

mating in the infrared,
each orange splotch with a yellow heart

pulsing “at once above/below” as Bernadette says,
and “it’s easier for love to have a million neighbors”

seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;

or we zag in blue swaths like zebra fish
flaunting eyes, lacing fins, in fact

yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook avalanche tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared in diode, The Moth, Muzzle, Plume, Pleiades, and The Offing. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.