The cell divided can eventually stand. Does anyone want a complete person beside them. Can anyone accept a magnitude. The exponent approaches platform. Does a deadlift. Bench press. Gavel gazing, up and down attention. Some people are eating something as others lick their teeth. Head first, stomach later. Trust science more than the scientist. The hands of people sweat. Yes, as you travel up my…
Remains
What I’d like is to tell you the redemption story. The same shine as balloons: a remnant of white in the sullen pupils of the dead-in-life, and how those dead may be made new, if they’ll fix a gaze long enough on just about anything the wind chooses to play with. A bonus for dusk, a grove of palmettos, or her flyaway hairs. In the…
Untitled, Athens, 2012
Ranbir Singh Sidhu is the author of Good Indian Girls and a winner of the Pushcart Prize in fiction. His stories and essays appear in Conjunctions, Salon, The Georgia Review, The Literary Review, and other journals. These are his first published photographs.
What Happens At Home Since I’ve Gone Away
I learn fast that there are rules in the underworld. If you want to get by, you have to work their system.’ Don’t eat anything, not even a seed. Don’t let one of them touch you, the damned with their eyes big as serving dishes. They’ll follow you around, sniffing your hair, which doesn’t smell like death, a not-smell they haven’t smelled before; you’ll go…
Brushstrokes
We don’t know where it goes. We don’t really care. When painting alla prima, you work back towards yourself. Oil based, wet-on-wet. Translated Italian: first attempt. Coat the canvas with magic white or phthalo blue. A single point of yellow, spread by the almighty fan brush, becomes the sun, the harvest moon. Clouds swirl and distant mountains rise from the borders, always outward in. Continue…