Anti-portrait of a lady by the lake
By Ahana Chakrabarti
by the lake: you—
bird-lipped, Monet-suns of fists clenched
in your lap—
from that brilliant
distance, your face was the size of
a fist the size of
my heart—& still,
I could make out the tremble of a swallow lodged
in your throat fleeting, like birdsong nestled
in the parenthesis between your clavicles:
this must be
where God resides? —face pressed
against the rain-corroded railing, I remember
still
the Vermeer of your ear the slow brushstrokes
of your body, legs that swung gently over rippling
water & van Gogh’s flower-corpses, windswept
with a tenderness reserved only for death—
it struck me then: how everything falls,
myself being no Daliesque exception—
I, too, wish to melt
into the timestop
of your hands.
Bio: Ahana Chakrabarti is a student from India. Their work has previously been published in Beaver Magazine, Full House Literary, Broken Antler Magazine, and other literary journals. They were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2024. As of now, they are deeply enamored with Clarice Lispector.
