Two Poems

After Hrs at the British Museum 

Only half-moon in plain sight. 

You know everything about the other 

half – bound in lines that you could see 

if you tried – 

I couldn’t. My bones doubled through the glass, 

weighing nothing, 

unlike the dazed empire relic on the other side 

which the world ends every night. 

Who’s a steal? Who’s a steal? 

My thumbprints were trafficked on this lemon, 

my body was fisted into size 

and in your secret where I live now, 

I live again. 

Glass shards everywhere, apparently. 

When you read aloud my object label 

like you’ve learnt anything for the first time, 

no one suspects foul play. 

And when your hair falls down in clumps 

and a clot of my skin unspools in your mouth 

where your tongue singes a citric hemisphere— 

the others say it’s your last meal by hand. 

At Porthmeor 

Yes, the sober edges of driftwood. 

As you say. 

Saltstroke; death by neon; 

maybe your hands were cold 

at Porthmeor, 

where words slip like the tide, 

brusquely, blue, pulling 

back and under 

and back under holes 

hiding silt and sea— 

the sink of the sinking— 

before noontide, 

there are no fish in the sun, 

no footprints or femurs, 

all lies lifted because 

your hands were cold. 

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Sharanya writes and teaches in Devon, England. She read for a PhD in Drama at the University of Exeter. Her fiction was shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize 2019.