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| Ink, Blood, and Tears, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib |
As if water dripping into
the steel sink, bleaching
our brushes white, scoring the floors
of our glass-doored office /
as if the vein of our favorite fountain
pens (the ones that dug into
our index fingers while we caricatured
old art teachers with balding
heads) had been spliced, spurting forth
ink-splotched faces, the aphorisms
we drew in bubbles, their blood-vowels /
as if bullets we drove into the walls
of easels, blithely / as if specks of flesh
carving out their wounds, sinew
torn in watercolor, shards of glass painted
in felt-tips / as if the tilt of our
mouths in these scenes, the seconds we
almost smiled between smearing
steeple-minaret-altar as if wings / as if
hierologists of tomorrows,
revealing our schisms, our compositions
in grays and whitespace/ as
if ours, a name stenciled on drywall, on
acid-free paper, beneath our
benedictions, beneath the as if / as if
beneath the / if /
Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poetry, nonfiction and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, elimae, Kartika Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2014 Srinivas Rayaprol Prize and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center.