Shloka Shankar
A Metonym for Life
“Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.” — Eudora Welty
The hunt for words [transitory,
placating] begins, casting
around for what I think
I need to say and how much;
someone once said that
the way out is through sentences:
long, short, end-stopped, bro
ken, fraught with meaning—
the soft shadows of vowels
residing along the curve
of your mouth
suddenly become mine.
A wall of silence, brick by brick,
gets torn down by a metonym for life—
reality.
The hunt for words [transitory,
placating] begins, casting
around for what I think
I need to say and how much;
someone once said that
the way out is through sentences:
long, short, end-stopped, bro
ken, fraught with meaning—
the soft shadows of vowels
residing along the curve
of your mouth
suddenly become mine.
A wall of silence, brick by brick,
gets torn down by a metonym for life—
reality.
Biography
Shloka Shankar is a writer and visual artist from Bangalore, India. A Best of the Net Nominee and award-winning haiku poet, her poems and artwork have recently appeared in Burning House Press, Contemporary Haibun Online, talking about strawberries all of the time, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Bones: journal for the short poem among others. Shloka is the founding editor of Sonic Boom, its imprint Yavanika Press, and Senior Editor for Human/Kind Journal. Twitter: @shloks89.
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