“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God”– Borges
That year when summer butterflied into winter, I caterpillared into a thief. Your dialect was the first to go; its lilts transitioned into a guitar riff, which I sneakily secured inside my bones. The morphology of your mind I morphed into a semblance of sanity in parallel time. That lone cigarette we’d once shared became the sun inside the dark alleys of my eyes. Your shifting identities I stole overtime, cataloguing them into neat rows for perusal in lonelier times. I stole and stole until I became a salient museum of your youness. Now this museum is just another brick and mortar in a city learning to steal differently.
Note: Storm In A Teacup is a song by Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
Written by Nikita Parik
The recipient of Nissim International Poetry Prize II 2020, Nikita Parik holds a Master’s in Linguistics, a three-year diploma in French, and another Masters in English. Her debut book of poems, Diacritics of Desire, was launched in April 2019. She has been invited to read her poems at Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of Letters, for their Multilingual Poet’s Meet and Young Writer’s Meet programmes. Her works have appeared in Rattle, The Alipore Post, Ucity Review, Vayavya, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Mad Swirl, The Metaworker, and so on. She currently edits EKL Review.
