Toshani
lipstick on an orange
i am an
Orange. Rounded and curved and ripened
by the tongue of the sun and the palms
of the earth. Orange,
as orange an orange can be.
Everyone looks at me
and prods. Pierces my dimpled skin with their
painted nails and calls me
a tangerine, or places me in a fruit basket,
and labels me ‘clementine.’
i bleed and bruise and swell in
Orange.
In the winter, when I am chartreuse; lemony-
green and yellow all over,
a fishhook tugs at their eyebrows
and they simply exclaim: lime.
Orange! Orange! Orange!
my fleshy and threaded and encased
seeds whisper in hushed volumes.
Instead, you wash off the waxy coat
from my exterior,
pick me up in your ordinary palms,
peel my skin open. And declare
Orange! It’s an orange. As plain as day;
Can’t you all see?
Lemon tea and other musings
You slurp my vowels
all over an old, chipped
Blue-china plate; blue-china
plates crack and shatter
As you run from the altar; the altar
Where you swirled vanity into your lemon tea.
And I wish I could be so unabashed; unabashed
In my being as the ogling lizard when he
melts into the empty alley when dawn
breaks; as the ruffled pigeon unknowingly
ostracized from good society; society where the
Scrawny bramble, short and stubbed, sparkles
from behind the flamboyant petals of a rose,
And even though you said
familiarity breeds contempt,
familiarity bleeds contempt only when it
isn’t tended to right; right?
Because how else does the burnt garlic
Melt on my tongue sweetly every time;
every time when the eggs and flour
marry each other in a circular metal tin
In which I can eat away my hours
In eternal, saccharine ignorance.
I want every flaw to ooze out of me
Still full with bees; bees that sink into
my idiosyncrasies like a sweet poison of their
own making; making me swirl it into y(our) lemon tea.
Toshani is an Indian creative with a love for the written word, art, and expression in all its forms. She uses different mediums to unearth the unending complexities of the human experience, identity and her relationship with the world. Toshani likes to dance, cook and pet cats in her free time.