stone butch sonnet by Aishvarya Arora
- 21 hours ago
- 1 min read
this morning, my incisors crunch an overly laminated
danish into shards as my chest bumps with the staccato of my quad-shot cortado. still, i loll, somnolent,
on the sill. make googly eyes at the fresh baby dazed from nursing. my menstruation twisted circadian jolts my hypothalamus hysterical. the story in me is spineless;
it won’t startle for the busy street beyond the bakery glass.
on one side, nodding florets of white-headed hydrangeas
on limber stems. on the other, a brick wall with orange graffiti that says clit. like insight, cyclists blaze through. like bikes, insight is wheeled & rented by the minute. like rot, the minutes fuzz me till i am stinking, baby-less & blank-eyed, my eggs emptying inside, each one a perfect cloud fogged marvel, a unit in
a unit in a unit in a unit in a unit in a unit in a unit in a unit in
AISHVARYA ARORA is a poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer from Queens, NY. They’re the author of the chapbook Mr. Time (Gold Line Press, 2026). Their writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Foglifter, among others. Currently, they live in Ithaca, NY, where they teach creative writing at Cornell University and create poetry ephemera through their micro-press, Lavender Codex.
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