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Anjali Bhavan is a college student in New Delhi. She likes to write, watch movies, read poems and code, and believes the world to be a far more interesting place that she knows.

Inanna

Inanna crawls out of the brown of my
skin, she emerges from my restlessness
and wears a crown of my laburnum naivete,
she fashions a robe for herself that covers my
loneliness in pretty April blossoms, her lapis lazuli
smile is the crowning glory of my dawnbreak and
my desperation as I go day by day missing something
whose name I have not yet learned to carve onto my
chest as a medallion of all the longing I’ve ever harbored.
Inanna makes heliotropes bloom over my flaring
sunsets, she searches for Ereshkigal in the depths of
my eyes for what netherworld existed if it did not burn
within my anger and my silence and roll out as
perspiration sitting under my nail bed, a hotbed of cries
echoed by my eyes which are all black, all quiet and all
that Inanna must have thought while walking through
the seven steps of undress like through an amethyst
cold, a rhinestone insanity?
Inanna sings of the green fields that shine in the lining
of her eyebrows, she puts on anklets dripping with the
moon’s radiance and she walks on water, she walks on
my mother’s pale skin and lays down all my fears to rest,
she cradles my father’s agony in her lap and covers it in
magnolias, she sews emeralds into my battered self-esteem
and vanishes into the open arms of hell as I try to keep her
besides me but I only ever know how to float away into
the tracks of my sadness and never wake up