!50! Such greenness—the lawn!
Bent-back blades & dewdrop sequins
stitched in sequence replicate
!100! the fly’s eye tweed of my dress.
!50! Here I am, mama, amplified the way
you always wished.
Lawnmower ripcord starts up,
!100! the kind that tugs gasoline-rich
!100! the kind that swipes off toes,
like when cousin Linus
!50! sprinkled the grass with his flesh.
Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook avalanche tunnel (2016). She has read, performed, or taught workshops at Split This Rock, the Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore, India. Recent work has appeared in diode, Muzzle, Plume, Pleiades, and The Offing. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches English at Hunter College.