Regardless of what your doing this summer, be it lounging by your town pool, pouring coffee for your supervisors at a NYC internship, taking summer classes, or stumbling around New Brunswick every night wondering where the party people at, there’s a good possibility that you’ve got some down time that you don’t know what to do with. Finished all of Game of Thrones AND Ovid’s Metamorphoses? I’ve got just the thing for you. Some local poetry, fresh-picked for the Rutgers Review!
-Samantha Mitchell
vacant existence
I can’t seem to recollect
whether or not you existed.
The whisper you left on my skin
blew up as ashes from the fireplaces
that imploded in this fragile heart.
Between the cardboard box cities I built
in my mind
I found your calloused fingers
latch themselves, interlacing mine.
Our ears were drenched in heavy sounds
lullabies of hidden hummingbirds
in our chests.
Breathing slowly, heavily
the melody would flow out like rivers
we ran our hands across on mildewed nights.
But, I can’t seem to recollect
whether or not you existed.
We were of a double-digit age
and the world was this cage
built around us. You said your sorrows were cumulonimbus puffs
that dripped tears on unpleasant evenings.
My eyes were puffed with coarse words
that last evening. The ones you so easily tore from your lungs –
diffused into my alveoli.
The accusations that I stole from you,
they cradled themselves into my atria, slipping into the ventricles
the pressure overbearing, oh that first palpitation, I choked.
But, if only I could hand you visions of the truth
or twist the twisted imaginings of your mind
with these tangible hands.
My words stopped at the steps of your eardrums
that wouldn’t let me in.
What of the day spent in tour
of the largest lighthouse in this country?
The bright bulb shifting across the waters
of your eyes as I told you intrepid words
I shouldn’t have said.
Five hours in Martha’s vines we drank
the incomparable happiness we sought
in a tangy liquid of desire.
In moments we knew that the world was
not a bird cage but the open window
to dive through.
But, I can’t seem to recollect
Whether or not you existed.
No, you must be an invention
a madwoman’s creation in the depth of mania.
by Nagma Kapoor