When desire returns,
I find a tangerine
in hiding, the refrigerator’s winter
having not been kind.
Frost speckles over blue-dark bruising
and the ash-bloom of mold.
Its peel is pocked and sags and gives
under my fingers.
Once I loved its low weight in my palm.
Now, it is lighter, but gaseous, uneven,
and my desire is gone.
Suddenly, all at once, I am confronted
with my life’s great melancholy.
I will never be as beautiful as I was at eighteen.
See where my hairline peels back, wrinkles
encroaching upon ceded skin.
Another boyfriend has discarded me.
Whatever strings that tie my skin to my body
have loosened—
it pulls away, it longs, like a bad coat, to fall free.
The world’s desire for me
dwindles with every grey dawn, while mine only grows.
This is aging, I suppose.
To give less. To want more.
Who will love me lightly
when my youth is gone?
I don’t mean in spite of. I don’t mean regardless.
I want the love people offer, helplessly,
to a stranger’s beauty.
The barista writing my name on the cup without my speaking
not because I have said it enough,
but because she sees me and thinks,
hers is a face worth committing to memory.
Desire chiefly out of pleasure, not need.
The girl who could have guava for breakfast,
but chooses the tangerine.
–
Divyasri Krishnan studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her poems are published in Muzzle Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net finalist and reads for The Adroit Journal.