Ajay Kumar

August 25, 2022

“Balancing Act” by Ajay KumarPosted by

Blueprint of a Dream by Jaundré van Breda, mostly blue photograph of boys jumping from an old pier into a mountain lake

Image: “Blueprint of a Dream” by Jaundré van Breda. “Balancing Act” was written by Ajay Kumar for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2022, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Ajay Kumar

BALANCING ACT

you are on your tiptoes to see your mother
in the ICU ward, her face in a heart of glass
 
made blue with nebulized breath, by confession
of the hospital floor in your eyes that the only nest
 
for a tired bird is air itself, cleaner than your conscience
that preferred her death over the fall again, and the fits.
 
a lone grain of dust coaxes from your eyes a confession
of unasked water held back for some other occasion :
 
when she sleeps there is a nightmare sleeping there
in a way you cannot even dream of : how an hourglass
 
looks like a brittle polygon of infinity and infinity
appears to be a balancing act of two teardrops.
 
when she returns and looks at you : a breathingtube
for a nosering, a hospital gown the color of fadedgrass
 
that splits nakedbrown at the back : you knew you had to
oar her drained boat of a smile to some shore where
she won’t lose herself to things you can’t understand.
 
say she wants a hole on her body where nothing happens
say her drool melts her chin into a smudged feather
 
her flesh pricked like a legostrip that fits in then falls apart
for a new design : more what’s broken than what broke it.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
July 2022, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Jaundré van Breda: “I consider that a poem’s success, like a painting or piece of music, depends solely on the reader and what they get from it. Balancing act gave me more than I expected. It made me feel.”

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February 20, 2020

“An Index of Visitors” by Ajay KumarPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020: Artist’s Choice

 

watercolor painting of nighttime street scene with liquor store

Image: “Open All Night” by Kate Peper. “An Index of Visitors” was written by Ajay Kumar for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2020, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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Ajay Kumar

AN INDEX OF VISITORS

I’ve seen something like this somewhere, all the time.
white, black & red the first colors. as we enter november,

the weather turns december. as it was june, it was also may.
remember, all the buildings blurring by to the next station.

remember the index of visitors, the middle-finger ring-fingers,
singers whose songs were just extended foreplays.

an old couple practice arranging furniture on the street,
still looking for the house they were sent to. sunglass-seller

on the newspaper-road-blanket looks polaroidal, as we enter
the new year, kaleidoscopic weather, stuck in the last decade.

swinging lighters caught the ruddiness of the white of eyes.
tea, tap, tray, gully rap to traffic-beat-hymns of highway

protests. blushing heel in my soiled hands, on my crossed legs,
soiling them too. we came out & went back in through somewhere else,

& being told about a way from the inside, we realized
how everything’s connected by a skeleton of ladders, like roads,

like railway lines, computer chips, germs of the lips of canon-mouths.
still, I see something like this somewhere all the time but every time

is different, with new unstill flames. the old couple pack up with all
their wooden things in the back of a truck to the next station. on fridays,

the sunglass-seller sells toy parrots instead, which fly into the neon lights
until the next. this time, from this body place the car has already moved

away half towards the blinding light. but as it was gone,
it was also there, waving & particle, all the time.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
January 2020, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Kate Peper: “Ted Kooser wrote, ‘… I hope that after I have labored over my poems … they look as if they’d been dashed off in a few minutes, the way good watercolor paintings look.’ One of the many things I love about this poem—and why I kept coming back to it—was that it embodied the very essence of what Ted Kooser wrote: immediacy, quickness and unexpected moments. I’m also a sucker for surreal imagery. And this poem manages to link ‘by a skeleton of ladders’ all its wild bounty into something beautiful and cohesive, and yet elusive. In the end, the poet’s attempt—like my attempt to paint a street scene at night—realizes it can never be captured: ‘… it was gone,/ it was also there, waving & particle, all the time.’”

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