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C.N.P Poetry 

Writer's pictureCathexis Northwest Press

Portrait of the Arrow Puncturing Time

By: Shawn Anto

rice-white sinister grin

look at my face, I am not entirely disrupted

I resist the process.


God could not carve beauty out of the tree

we planted our hopes, root down, my mother

wanted us to have a better life

do not eat the apple, she says

but I need nourishment


did we leave for the better was it better?


I suspect treachery, I crawl around forever

through the seasons, I think and think

a looped-memory of rivers I wasn’t allowed to go in.


I keep drowning in my dreams.


I cut the tree down

throw the branches into the water

watch them float away from me

I carve an arrow from the branch I left

stick, stuck in the dirt, I exist in this wet blur

I draw my face in the mud, then my mother’s

then my father’s, then my brother’s

until the rain comes.



 

Shawn Anto is from Delano, California. He’s originally from Kerala, India. He received his B.A. in English & Theatre at CSU Bakersfield. His writing has been featured or are forthcoming in Reed Magazine, O:JA&L, Mojave Heart Review, and elsewhere.

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