The Lonely Egg


Whose fist came down hard on the table—
it is difficult to reason amid the cacophony
but my parents’ marriage of forty years

stood shaken and cracked like bruised earth. All of the
bony sacraments buried beneath the town’s
exposed canal, trapped in some underworld
isthmus resembling a sweatshop of skulls,

sung to my mother on a rare morning
walk; she tells me: my time is nearly over anyway,
I hope you will marry well. I have craved in winters

epidermal warmth; in summers, the light
of the breeze against my cheek stirs in me
a lust to exhale. To quell its effect, I coil
sideways in sleep the way my dog does

to lick dirt off its hind legs. Ashbery remarks—
completing a circle could deceive you into thinking
you have made progress. Still I ride

the Ferris wheel, time and time again, for
the plunging stomach, cheap altitude, easy vertigo.
Once, a priest traced a circle in my palms
before whispering to me: your real lifeline

is water, marry a swimmer. On the shore, I mistake
a solitary turtle egg for a plastic ball. I’m stunned
by its roundness. I learn many turtle eggs never

hatch. Like most reptiles, the parent simply abandons
the eggs after laying them. A beach cleanup drive here
recently cleared 2000 kilos of trash. I wonder how
this egg ended up alone. The Bay of Bengal coughs up

a flip-flop at my feet. The gift of the tide clacks beneath
my heel. While I’m sinking into the sand, why is it so hard
to ask you to grab my outstretched hand?