by Arista Engineer
When I was 22, the world ended.
Then it started back up again.
Sort of.
It had ended before, you see,
in thunder, lightning, and in rain,
coughing, sneezing, fevered brains.
At 23, all my poems are about being tired:
exhausted, weary, fatigued,
overextended,
overtired,
overkill,
and yet—
My tired poems & I
make our way to school.
We’ve missed the buses,
(we overslept)
we’re overpaying for the Lyft.
And yet—
clattering up the cobbled road
this morning,
I saw a pair of goldfinches
fly out of a garden hedge.
Arista Rawat Engineer is a poet whose work delves into questions that arise from the confluence of different worlds: modernity and tradition, language and culture, myth and literature, and so on. From Pune, India, she is working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. Her poems have appeared in the Airplane Poetry Movement anthology A Letter, A Poem, A Home: a collection of poems and essays.