Pleiomorph
Jayant Kashyap
“You and I
have begun to blur.”
—Will Graham to Hannibal Lecter
There are only so many characters
I can pack into myself.
Every time I wake up,
I’m a different
person—
yesterday, I woke
to a broken mirror, my face
bleeding.
The cotton you’d left in the drawer
had coloured itself.
The doctor said it’ll heal
in air, that caging forms pus—
forms bile—
said use soap,
learn how to clean a wound.
The soap’s broken itself
into malleable flints.
I try making them one again,
so the blood washes off.
Its joints etched red
like bird bones
in a china.
The day before, the mirror
smiled back;
the day before
the day before
there was no mirror—
there are only so many
characters—
About the writer
Jayant Kashyap has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has published two pamphlets and a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021). His work appears in POETRY, Magma and elsewhere.