Aardhra Chandran
Corrosion
The sari still carries petrichor and cedar,
exhumed from a dark trunk
through which monsoons
have come and gone.
Her thumb follows the silver filigree.
One filament catches—
a bright, infinitesimal tooth beneath the nail.
She thinks of the wedding heat:
tuberose bruising in its garlands,
white throats tinctured brown,
the small metallic mouths of pins
biting her waist,
teaching the pleats their obedience.
Years have not effaced the red.
It has migrated through the weave,
a fugitive tincture beneath the lining,
deepening everywhere the fabric folded.
A little color loosens from the stain
onto her skin, a private chemistry of blood.
By the photographs,
the silk had memorized her body
more completely than she had.
All evening, hands kept entering the cloth—
lifting its border from the floor,
flattening a crease against her hip,
drawing the pallu higher,
turning her toward the light.
No one asked, then or after, whether it had hurt.
Red Dust
The massif made no sound
when the shovel entered its flank.
It exhaled chalcopyrite dust
that settled inside my matriarch’s teeth,
a taste of buried iron.
From the escarpment we watched
the shorea trees fall,
their roots worrying the vacancy
like hands searching a body.
The overseers unfolded vellum
bearing our names. None of us had signed.
By evening the hornbill’s call
had nowhere left to return.
Now concrete occupies the valley.
I carry a fistful of humic loam
from the last ground we stood on.
When I open my hand,
three sharp pitons remain.
Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Bloodroot Poetry Journal, Gulmohur Quarterly, Rust & Moth, The Tiger Moth Review, Punch Magazine, Philly Chapbook Review, and elsewhere. She writes about memory, place, ecological loss, the body, and inheritance.