Stealing That Storm In A Teacup: A Poem by Nikita Parik
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God”– Borges
That year when summer
butterflied into
winter, I caterpillared
into a thief. Your dialect
was the first to go;
its lilts transitioned
into a guitar riff, which I
sneakily secured
inside my bones.
The morphology of your mind
I morphed into a semblance
of sanity in parallel time.
That lone cigarette we’d
once shared became
the sun inside the dark
alleys of my eyes.
Your shifting identities
I stole over time,
cataloguing them into
neat rows for
perusal in lonelier times.
I stole and stole until I
became a salient
museum of your youness.
Now this museum is
just another brick
and mortar in a city
learning to steal differently.
Note: Storm In A Teacup is a song by Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
About The Poet
The recipient of Nissim International Poetry Prize II 2020, Nikita Parik holds a Master’s in Linguistics, a three-year diploma in French, and another Masters in English. Her debut book of poems, Diacritics of Desire, was launched in April 2019. She has been invited to read her poems at Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of Letters, for their Multilingual Poet’s Meet and Young Writer’s Meet programmes. Her works have appeared in Rattle, The Alipore Post, Ucity Review, Vayavya, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Mad Swirl, The Metaworker, and so on. She currently edits EKL Review.
