Deep Sea Pi
By Maryam Gowralli
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This mathematical constant, we tried to cut the ocean to see how we
could remain in the presence and give it a name. A flavour neither belonging to the First World or the Third, or the hippy versions of transatlantic or transpacific crumbs. Could we measure you into spheres? We twirl fluids like a pretzel. Postulating the time you belonged to us, creating borders to imply an identity with showers of wanderlust. Do we know what it feels like to be a decimal? Portraying a specific principle to exist? You spit stories and epistemologies that can’t be tamed while we try overlapping them like papier-mâché: global inquiry, capital, localism, some neoimperialistic act, drowned bodies and mercantilisms. Say here, we want you thick with habitat, swelling the expanse of a lung. Perhaps then we can count the sounds of your diaphragmatic breathing. Jostling widths of memory. Flying Dutchman, or a WWII Encounter in
By Maryam Gowralli
At the waist. Viewing the world prone-wise
he never expected to find her. Each hour Wasted by clinking trills in the night, these Radical booms. Shaking the body with memories of Something too far gone. Each hour becomes a door to a lucid figment of Van Hoebeek, as if to say despite the humid, he had gotten thinner. He views her waist, while she bends his skull like gum from a rubber tree. He wants to kiss his Mannlicher by the Hair. So he can feel lungs crushed to his body. Opening, he “never expected to find her here.” Beautiful & non-processed. Ellipses. All interest in music is lost. Words don’t seem to scrape away Earwax the way they used to. This Language is off key—smelling. The world has more ontologies to offer than monophthongs. Wandering Out of sight. Mercy comes by tying his nonsense to the semantics of bleeding. Covered in ancient vultures, she splits open his jaws to wrap bindings around each tooth, filling his mouth with lychee’s until his eyes close shut. He continues to Love the doctor blind. She is the keeper of some transcendental moon-language. Today, waterfall means staying hidden. Commanded by Hypothermia, he lusts to move. But his body Is sailing from one room to Another. While he sees his men Blown by sounds of jungle crickets, fricatives & bombs. Peripatetic by the starlight, a woman like a nation that would neither end Nor begin. Wondering if he misses the Boundaries of his helmet. She breaks his finger nails. And uses them as pincers. Mouth-wide means the winds no longer reek of the dead. Just silence. Pure & clean. Doing as Commanded & because he discerned that keeping open must mean, some form of capitulating. It originated. A Universal human rumble. Shaking the bloodied sockets of his now rotten teeth. She pulls—each tooth and swallows them into the Earth. For every hour, a tusk is shimmied into its place. For every half, an octopi beak. And for every year, baleen. He awakens to the sounds of a new language. While she sings medicine reeds, subduing the aches of rotten teeth. when dismantling skinBy Maryam Gowralli
Once I was told of a wilderness in my mind,
between the bee hives in Water Valley and my mother’s skin tags. Once I saw a moose folding its antlers a dusk caravan in the interior. This is how one hides behind a throat to change their skin. Unwanted blood clots a sign of a newly presented self— too involved in the national condition. I see myself an ungulate an odd-toe jutting out the way my songs speak of a continental shelf too far to swim to but so close to a grave. Once I rolled my ink like a ballpoint pen writing a deftly-shaped body: a tick too nosy about souls written on steelpans. A rhino too blinded, faithfully imbibing scents of green tea in the morning. Then there are days a cosmopolitan of translation is all I am. Maryam Gowralli draws inspiration from her Trinidadian-Indian and Indonesian heritage. Her debut poetry collection, Citizenship in Water is forthcoming with That Painted Horse Press (2021). She is currently the Creative Nonfiction Editor for filling Station and is pursing an MA in English Literature at the University of Calgary. You can find her works at PRISM International, The Selkie, untethered Magazine, The Caribbean Writer and other journals. Twitter: @MaryamGalli
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