Baby Eagles
I wake readily as my pillow quakes over the phone, yanks
The zipper close on a liquid subterranean world
As now I must do to my child who pushes hard
The door of the day. Five minutes, two minutes? No
I worry about plaque, unpoliced in her sleepy brushing
Can I skip the milk, wear bunny ears? No
We walk a concrete path by the trimmed hedges
Lillies lick cold compound walls
A canopy of manicured trees huddles above us
In the cool shade, stone islands are in queue
To hold our feet, save us from a sea of mowed grass
I worry she’ll drown with her hopping, her stomping. No
An eagle swoops. She picks twigs for a nest
That will sway forty feet above
Where soon sealed eyes will open
Translucent necks will stretch asking
Soft mouths will meet grub in a hard beak
Their screeches will be small as they tumble out
Knowing nothing of self-pity, the wheels of large trucks
They’ll open wings and sure as day, there will be flight
Miracle only to the flightless
The school bus on the tracking app is a green worm
Something in me wants to swoop and pick it up
It hurries away with my child and I jog along, wave
Can be absolved? I ask. No
Losing, Finding
I wake to hear your voice
Outside my dark tunnel dream
Pulling me with ropes
Out of my sofa slumber
Calling out to me from below
Our creeper-riddled balcony
You are on the ground-floor pathway
By the cavernous concrete planters
Muscular bougainvillea
Their beat of left, right, left, right
Their shock of blossoms climbing
“You said you’d come downstairs,”
You shout from another planet
From another life
A triangle on your bicycle
Stopping wind in its way
Your voice rises
In bubbles floating
Up over squeals
Over thumping footballs
Your defiant face,
Cheeks pinched by heat,
Arching up at me
Sunflower to the sun
Demanding
In that loose t-shirt
With the grumpy cat,
Flower-power sunglasses
A familiar ache oozes—
Of losing you, losing this moment
Losing the robustness of life
Embroidered with strands of guilt
Everything glows with a possibility of rain
I grab the umbrella, slap
Slap slap my chappals downstairs
And hug you like I found my way
Out of the tunnel, out of darkness
Deepthi Krishnamurthy is a writer and editor from Bangalore. Her short stories have been published in Literary Mama, Spark magazine and the anthology When Women Speak Up. She is currently working on a novel and is an Emerging Writer at the Himalayan Writing Retreat.