Love me with the backbones of a hundred Decembers,
between the ridged boughs of our naked sentrees;
Love me with the tremors of frigid catalepsy,
while winter anapests crawl into our bones.
Love me with the frailty of January dreams,
wear me like a skin.
I flitted thrushes underneath your lids,
flight whickered between your lashes.
Your feathers fluttered down my cheek:
you moulted mid-flight.
They say you were a migratory bird,
that given time you would return,
fly back to me, your winter home,
That like Scheherazade, your plumage
would nightly flicker tales,
nestled between my breasts:
But you’d always fly away.
Love me with the frostlings of February whims,
between the whispers of the wind.
Love me with the flotsam of muslin hypothermia,
While arctic tenderness descends upon our brow.
Love me with the futility of holding March at bay,
wrap me in your wings, before you fly away.
Anushri Nanavati
Anushri Nanavati is a poet and the founder of Haiku & Hymns in Ahmedabad, India, where she teaches creative writing, literature, psychology, history, and foreign languages. She has recently published her second poetry collection titled, “Birds, Bones, & Melancholia,” based on her mental health journey so far.
