“Post-Elegy” is Sneha Subramanian Kanta‘s lovely, dark, and deep poem from our Winter 2019 issue.

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IS IT AN ELEGY WHEN YOU PRAY
for everything that tried to
kill you but did not? How you
delivered breath after breath
out of your nostrils to add the
world? I don’t need words to
describe the silence that can be
lodged into bodies as years roll.
I have reached my lost loved
ones in the brevity of letters
they will never read. We let go
the minute we love. We don’t
learn to love, we love as though
we’d been there all along, our
eyes cast beyond the distance.
Once, I stood by the surface
of a river & counted stars
through their reflections. Tell
me the light we forget to love
has guided us through the dark.
I dream dark as a forest of olive
green leaves where we wander.
The dark moves our dead. Faint
light coaxes the earth to escape.
The earth shatters a little. The
sun rises from the underbelly of
an ocean. We eat the light. We
rise like ghosts with parched
mouths into the last silence.

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SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA is a recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship 2019 at the University of Stirling, Scotland. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the author of Synecdoche (The Poetry Annals) and Prosopopoeia (Ghost City Press). She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and poetry reader for Palette Poetry.