Elina Kumra
Nightingales
I won’t be absolved for the forms I’ve taken. Sands recoils from me. Minarets turn away me. Each Navaratri, when the air thickens with restrained want, I glide over you with tongued whispers. To silence this form, you must answer to my tendrilled needs. All I craved was to caress and kiss you, widen them to the light, and thrive within prayer-slick hollows. How you misconstrue my affection. If I ever choked nightingales, it was merely because I yearned for loftier songs.
Elina Kumra is a 17-year-old Junior living in San Jose, California. Her poems and fiction have been published in Quarterly West, Wingless Dreamer, Reed Magazine, Up North Lit, Writer's Digest, StreetLit, Coffin Bell, Polyphony Lit, Death Rattle, Typishly, Cathexis NorthWest Press, Tint, and Peauxdunque Review. She is Reed Magazine Emerging Voices Winner, a Finalist in Quarterly West, Fractured Lit, Ouroboros, and a Semi-finalist in the Nine-Syllables Chapbook Contest.