Love Letters by Karan Kapoor

Love Letters | Karan Kapoor

Dear Blue, You are an island far away. Extraterrestrial like oyster shells, I want to carry in my palms the stones beneath your feet. I rub moss all over my body as a way to be near you. An island is the raised thumb of an ocean. It means ocean is having a really good day. Or perhaps ocean is hailing a cab. I am working on convincing ocean to take a walk, so I can walk to where you are. For now, I let the sky open and cry in my arms. Rain is the way clouds look after us — the true teachers of returning. I trace my origin to the sun. To South Africa over three hundred thousand years ago. I am the color of fire, yolk, urine, lemons, daffodils, bananas, longing, summer honey. That I might be made up of cow urine might make you laugh. But I am made from the earth and you are sky. I want to rise above and fly through this smog and reach your doorstep. When we touch, we will be the color of a healed world. Eternally yours, Yellow.

Dearest Yellow, Your words are the cause of light. You are the subject of sun’s envy. Though you remind sunflowers to turn, they wither in my presence. I raise my hand but nobody asks why. When I was born, my mother’s milk came out blue. I did not know you then, but sometimes when I feel alone (which is a regular occurrence in this country where rivers stretch like veins over the broken skin of the earth) I imagine I have known you my whole life. Silver-gray clouds, like thieves, hop the fence of horizon. All beaches I touch hold a signpost warning against tsunamis. How does one outrun a tsunami? I did not mean for this letter to loom with death but these days even the palm trees along the stripmalls do not cheer me up. I am a world without footprints. I am the broom that scatters the dust of joy, shatters the vase of mercy. I am bruise, I am ice, I am Shiva’s throat, I am death. My prayer is not more than gossip. Why do you lose yourself in the atlas of earth and water? This fugue of distance. Do all colors not turn black if mixed together over and over? Yours in the pandemonium, yours in the quiet, Blue. 

About the Author:

Karan Kapoor is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. Their poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, fiction in JOYLAND and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review. They’re the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS.