Invisible Poetry

Imagery like the piles of cauliflower stacked perfectly on the trucks of Delhi. Ellipses like the vanishing alleyways of Prague. Semi-colons like the gasp of the first sight of Baobabs in Antananarivo. Anonymous pronouns like the scones of London. Margins like the white robes at Tiananmen Square. Anaphora like the holes where the bombs fell in Berlin. Metaphors like buds bursting through peeling walls in Lhasa. Volta like when I met you in Paris. Catalexis like leaving my shoes in Sossusvlei. Rhyme like the man in penguin boxers and an orange tie on the subway in Brooklyn. Enjambment like the nomad that reached Ulan Bator. Couplet like the orchid and the hummingbird in Cuzco. Assonance like the popcorn drinkers of Addis, tone like transcendentalism in Thimphu. Sonnet like wandering and wondering, sonnet like all cities as one.

Himali Singh Soin

Himali writes looking out of Euclid's window. She likes varieties of distances, map-making, getting lost along street corners and finding poems forming fronds in fish bowls, dust-ridden inside door-knobs or wilting in wine glasses. Previous poetry has been published in Eclectica, TFQ Magazine, Quay Journal, 491, Prairie Schooner, Pratilipi, Pyrta, Kritya, ArtSlant, TAKE on Art, and Bread Loaf School of English Journal among others. Her poems also feature in anthologies including Yellow Nib: Poetry in English by Indians.

Note: This poem was "inspired by a summer spent steeped in Calvino's marvelous mind, mapping the everywhere and the nowhere. Thanks to Paul Muldoon for encouraging [its] waywardness."