“Tomato Garden” and Other Poems

By Ananya Kanai Shah

Tomato Garden

father, lover of fresh pineapple

                                                red grapes plucked by hand

                                                            your shorn nails stem

neck incision heavy with residual

            blood, garland of tubes

                        cheeks warmed by a blanket

specter of breath,

pomegranate hued

                                                     lips the color of drained tomatoes

                             in the cold, a wheelbarrow

                                           beguiled by sudden frost

                                                         golden peppers jaundiced

warm blood; my companion

            the diaphanous morning did not save you

                               as you swam ashore

Shivangi Chandrashekhar - Stained, Turmeric and chili powder on canvas
Image description: The word “home,” followed by a period, is cut into a surface, revealing a gray background beneath it. The surface is covered in shades of red and orange pigment. The grainy, powdery pigment is denser in some spots, creating a sandy texture.

---

Beauty on an Autumn Day

Fall, and there is less salt in the soil

this year. Her untrimmed body, its sabbatical

she has made up her mind

to enjoy; the other body in jest:

always slightly tangential to her angles.

Beige walls, tart—

the artfulness of sliced

air, too-muchness

of cinnamon. Is there any understanding

here? She thinks of roasted acorns

on Walden Pond. The hair’s caramel smell.

Dawn’s sandstone light under

the covers, everywhere on the trees,

a guttural yellow. The pink

of her nails flatlining

to burgundy. Rabid,

the wishbone cleaves.

Yesterday you showed

me those raccoons teething on plush

nectarines, their particular ribosomic

energy unbound by

longing. Oh! If I

had known it would end like this,

I would have washed

my nightgown. The front of it

smeared with eyeliner.

---

A New Yorker in Paris

Ambergris and orange wine a noose

from every balcony. Mercy, he would have said.

On an old soul. How are you so fast in heels.

A cathedral at every corner. I have forgotten

the Lord’s Prayer that we recited each day

at Mount Carmel. Walking along the Seine to Sainte Chappelle—

blue and red roil & splinter, an orchestra

that stuns the mind. I could not hold your hand

when they injected tubes into your neck, Pappa.

Blue in the Tibetan Book of the Dead—

all matter aggregates into primordial

blue, Dharma lives in those vast reserves

of blue light—cobalt or sky I do not know—

that pierce the newly dead, quickening

their resolve. A soul forced into aeration.

I read this so it would help me.

On this side of solitude, a fistful.

A rhapsody by Rachmaninoff levitates.

Glamour’s irony—

a blade of grass in yellow, its sublimity

collapsing into petulance. It is uncool to look

stressed in a city of nonchalance

and long linen dresses puckered

at the waist. Ten years ago we saw Monet’s water lilies

float from spring into summer in the rotunda

at the Orangerie; yet again, I marvel at gentleness,

unimpressed that death is a test.

How much did you need

to go through alone? Your personality is artistic

so you should learn French. Just like New York, I can trace

where we walked all day long. Setting sun at 10 pm,

long warm day stretched across the skin, hurtling

chest, this “young lady” with a headache

and looking for minor absolution.

Shivangi Chandrashekhar - Untitled, Photograph
Image description: The black-and-white photograph depicts a close-up shot of textured surfaces and dark, vertical shadows. The surfaces, resembling skin, are densely covered in wrinkles. 

---

By Whose Permission

did the sage balconies

erupt into vines? There

is just you and me here

and the mice in the walls.

Always the mice. Hunger

swells until it becomes

solid like calcite. Your

hands swell until they

befuddle orchids,

the wasp’s itch, its

macabre wish to be fossilised

in sugar. I warned you

this would not be

enough. On Shaftesbury,

I am my dark sunglasses,

silvering a cure. I read The Historian

when I was ten because my father

let me and never forgot the thrill

of poring over old letters

in a monastery, its gothic

mystery, to search

for the undead. Agnus dei,

soft in sleep

and matted in ecstasy.

I am looking (oh so deeply!)

for the luminous

material of you.

Please remind me

that the interior

is always in need

of a rummaging.

In another abbey, a mass

murder, a stolen treatise

on laughter. Its unknitting

of starch. Like Adso, I would

have risked my life to look

for lightness. In my lap:

an open face.

Porcelain fragility

enameled on a yellow

dress. What if someone—

the beast of me—knocks

it dry? Corroded by water,

the harbor in sunset

gleams. Your face

an intruder. How

does it feel to share

your loneliness with

another person? Light’s

olive undertones rake

hair, catatonic.

My favorite date is karaoke.

Burgundy air,

a guitarist bemused

that a woman brought him

to his knees, one song

in the dark. Another still

consecrated by elbows.

My voice taking on some of you. 

---

Ananya Kanai Shah was born in Boston and raised in Ahmedabad, India. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a BA in Applied Math-Economics and Literary Arts from Brown University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares; The Los Angeles Review of Books; The Yale Review; Indian Literature, managed by Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters; the offing; Adroit Journal; and other magazines. She is currently working on her first collection of poems.

*

Shivangi Chandrasekhar was born in India and raised in England. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts at Loughborough University, focusing on artwork produced by Indian Diaspora artists. She then pursued a Master's degree Migration Studies to combine her interests in art and culture. Her artwork predominantly conveys her journey in the third space: she explores her experiences of a lived cultural plurality by drawing on her non-Western cultural roots in order to portray her hybrid identity. She is currently working on her own Tanjore Painting collection. 

---