by Ellen Kombiyil

You are making
macramé at the kitchen
table. Along the long repository
of wood

you are darning your life.
At this table, in this hour
of making, your life
is a fixed hole

spilling, like waterfalls,
a crashing ping of knots,
a silence
where hitch knots accumulate

into flowers, where the knot
coils from its source, a knot without
a mother inside its head
saying, speak.

In another life,
you see yourself
emerging from a tunnel
—you pass your mother

(the echo of a train
remembered)—
on the iron rails, chugging
in the opposite direction.

She wants to tell you something.
She’s wildly gesticulating.
As from a dream, the words
garble, knotted in the throat.

Her hands puncture
the fabric of air.
She’s talking and the void
will not fill.

____________________________________________________________

Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is the author of two poetry collections, Histories of the Future Perfect (2014) and Love as Invasive Species (2024), a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. Her visual art has been displayed at Emerge Gallery and is forthcoming in Bear Review, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West. She has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Cherry Tree, and Tahoma Literary Review. She currently teaches writing at Hunter College. See ellenkombiyil.com.

by Ellen Kombiyil

with two lines from Bernadette Mayer

On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.

For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.

Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind

arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk

I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes—
When I say the man I don’t mean my father.

Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,

arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant—
Is that him I just passed?

I don’t like cooking dinner,
get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.

“I have to send my meeting notes out in the morning,” he says;
I stir fry the tofu-slash-get distracted

by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.

In another place or through window tint
it appears to be raining on asphalt.

Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other

like flamingos on takeoff or just before dancing,
each of us moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.

Little Dot move left;
Little Dot don’t move just blink in vertical space

going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.

Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed
like night scenes, streaming taillights, headlights

the signal’s shifting red-green;
or we flicker like flamingos

mating in the infrared,
each orange splotch with a yellow heart

pulsing “at once above/below” as Bernadette says,
and “it’s easier for love to have a million neighbors”

seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;

or we zag in blue swaths like zebra fish
flaunting eyes, lacing fins, in fact

yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook avalanche tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared in diode, The Moth, Muzzle, Plume, Pleiades, and The Offing. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.