Serena Alagappan
—
The Body Keeps the Score
The rock drags itself—no it is tugged, by
the wind and the softening winter pond,
a bowl depressing like a suncup, wound
wider than it is deep. The rocks that chart
brushstrokes in sand are designed to leave their
mark, the veins in deserts won’t be wiped clean
by the joy of any far-off splashing.
There’s no threat here, no slosh or stupor. It’s
dry. Stick a fist in the earth and find dust
on your palms. Pray what you can’t remember
away. Thin floating ice panels break up
on sunny days. Then the stones catapult—
slowly—up to five meters per minute,
they plod on. Sometimes the paths in the sand
slog, non-linear like ribbons of salt-
water on a flushed face, like healing or
forgetting. Tell the rock to stop. (It won’t).
Prayer Peaks
Frost at high altitudes reaps snow stuck so tight flakes look like bones,
or like pilgrims stooped in worship, when their chins grind
their sternums and their eyes humor only sporadic peeks skyward.
*
Penitentes get their name here, from the converts who, inconsolable,
buckle from their feet. The jagged promise made by crowding
glacial blades might likewise move you to your knees.
*
Spires under a night sky, glinting like the stars that stake their claim in
darkness, still won’t melt when licked by sun if they’re high enough. Elderly
icicles, reversed in their rising, stand fifty feet tall on a satellite of Jupiter.
*
These frigid mountain vanes are a just a few hundred million miles
away. They live close too: in me and you, sensitive to temperature,
frozen in numb rupture.
Serena Alagappan is currently studying World Literatures in English at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and working as Poetry Editor for the Mays Anthology. Her poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, the Colorado Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere.
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