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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_headshot - Ellen Kombiyil.jpg

 

 

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.

Bear Review

8.2

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