by Hamsi Radhakrishnan
I
We like to think so much.
Right now, we’re made of all the things
we like to think we don’t believe in.
You’re the jagged end of a sword
dripping with the maybe blood
of all the demons in your head
that you would’ve slayed
if you weren’t so afraid
of hurting their feelings.
We like to think so much.
And these days, we’re only thinking ourselves into misery.
Drinking lies out of seeds
that would sprout into madness.
Hope is raw flesh that we’ve only been taught to
thrust our daggers into.
II
We were making homes out of humans,
every time somebody walked away, they left behind a door.
III
We were so busy trying to find
the ocean in the moonshine,
that we didn’t notice we were entangled.
And when we finally wanted to unravel —
show the world we weren’t folded at the center,
we had formed a knot from all our memories.
The further we pulled apart,
the more we were ripping at the seams.
IV
We like to think so much,
so we started thinking ourselves apart.
We felt our strings strain into slingshots,
our fingers stopped trying to find home.
How far can you extend your arms,
before they stop being your own?
V
We like to think so much,
we’re now made of all the things
that we promised each other we wouldn’t believe in.
Like vulnerability and forgiveness and everything
that makes the whole world feel out of balance.
We had never known how to fall apart,
so now we stack our stories on top of each other,
and ship it back home.
Today, I will open all the windows —
and when the wind blows
I know I’ll hear it whisper,
even in our broken sisterhood,
we were twisted
Hamsi Radhakrishnan is an engineering graduate and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Computational Biology. While not making terrible puns, she can be seen reading obscure literature and attempting to find metaphors in the seemingly ordinary.