Your dreams are costlier than you think. But I am not
in the business of going home anymore.
Heart more thunderclap than mud,
Do not
tell me it was not shockingly warm
how mouths carried your name across mahogany rooms.
Sometimes, the corpse is only quotidien. It falls on the floor
of empty mouths —
and the truth sounds not like clatter
but like swallow:
Myself catches me here
A life saved
is a life denied.
Sometimes, two hands hold together a face
and the day can burst into sunstreaked flames.
Rob your doubts. It’s time
they pay up.
Avleen K Mokha, also known as Mirabel, is a Montreal-based poet who grew up in Mumbai, India. Avleen holds a B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics from McGill University and was the 2019 winner of McGill’s Peterson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing. Presently, Avleen edits poetry and prose for Persephone’s Daughters, a literary magazine devoted to survivors of abuse. Her works have appeared in Déraciné Magazine, Dream Pop, and Siblini among others. Her debut collection DREAM FRAGMENTS is forthcoming this fall with Montreal’s Cactus Press.