Thoughts
are no sweet milk.Jharna Choudhury
The other day
I went walking and stuffed three pebbles in my
pocket
and it turns out they were two,
the third one was air.
Another day I do not know
how I ended up with the wrong pin number in an
envelope,
rang wrong phone numbers, missed my room number,
lost my car number and I assumed I am not good with
numbers
or wrong was too wrong for me;
but then when
somebody asked me my address
I remembered a road and a house
and that's it,
that’s all I have for today, close the curtains I
said.
Next day, somebody said hi in a cafe,
late afternoon,
that somebody offered me coffee,
hot cold yellow black brown milk,
I said “just coffeee”.
I did not mean an extra e.
“Hi, your name?”
I said Mi-li and left.
Outside a house, by the road,
a door opened to a bell.
A lady rushed to me, saying
“Darling Ju”, and hugged me so hard
that my mind whirled back thinking
there was no pebble, but a bird,
its bones crushed in my net pocket;
and I didn't know what to do with its tongue
curled out to me like a pointy feeling,
but to emboss in words.
***
Jharna Choudhury is an embroidery artist and storyteller from Guwahati, Assam, India. Her creative writings have been featured in the Muse India, The Little Journal of Northeast India, Spillwords, a collection titled Unsent Letters: From the South Asian Diaspora (2021), and forthcoming in four anthologies of poetry and memoir.
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