Umang Kalra
​Monsoon 2016

*

Istanbul

You tasted like rosewater and the
sickly sweetness of molasses waiting
to know what the surface of my tongue
felt like, and your scent was laced with
salt, secrets, stories of seafarers and
tea that glittered pink at sunset, lost
as it trickled down throats, punctuating
words that rolled out of mouths so
quickly even the wind wouldn't have
caught a whisper; you looked like a
map traced across, upon, on top of
centuries of dust and glass shards
scattered through alleys and dissolved
into the stones that built you, and I
wonder if you ever recognised the shy,
subtle sound of love that lives deep
within your walls, I wonder if your hands
ever went searching for something other
than the night's tapestry into which
you had carefully spun your history,
I wonder if you paid heed to my little
trembling feet that paved a story of their 
own upon your surface: I promised I
would return and bring more than my
tiny past with me the next time, I swore
upon the horizons that surrounded your
throbbing, churning frame that I would
taste your tangled air again, and my
little mind whispered to my little heart
that you were listening, but cities are
only shadows of the lives that exist
within their walls, aren't they, and
the words you poured into my little
skull, promising me that your tapestry
would be incomplete without a thread
that bore my name, those words only
lived inside my head, didn't they?

*

Untitled

I had loved the sea too gently,
I lived off the taste of salt that
floated kindly in the air and I lost
my mind to the little cuts that the
grains of sand bore into my
curling feet, and somehow
watching the sun kiss my
beloved, in shades of purple,
every evening would only pull
the softest sigh from my lungs,
until the current urged me forth,
until the water called my name
and I was racing against the wind,
against the shallow beating of
my heart, until the waves I had
loved from a distance, the waves
that used to lap at my feet and
coax me closer, suddenly dragged
my whole being into them and I
floated, I searched for light in the
darker depths, I wove inside and
out as it wrapped itself around me,
and my skin never missed the taste
of solid ground  — until solid ground
was all I could see, smell, hear,
until the sea that I had loved had
choked me back to the shore,
until I spent days lying in the shadows
of the trees, and as I coughed in
disgust, I realised that suns had
come, gone, while I lay on this
shore, and even the darkness had
stroked my hair in my sleep, and
I had spent more days on this
dry land than even the ocean could
​tell, yet somehow, I still lay drenched

*

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Umang Kalra is an 18-year-old museum enthusiast, obsessive reader, procrastinator, airport lover, art aficionado, and travel addict. She will soon begin pursuing an undergraduate degree in History from Trinity College Dublin.