Ellen Kombiyil
—
Land Carnivore
If I could
spread my scent
among the wilds
if I could
in summer
distinguish more
than the smell
of fish, mussels
hiding in ice caves
would be easy
to pluck and I
might swim again
in awkwardness
my giant
inefficient paddling
Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro-chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work can be found in North American Review, The Minnesota Review, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. 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. A Co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing first books from India and the diaspora, she served as an editor, publisher, and teaching artist there through 2019. She currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.
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