I Spritzed Your Perfume and it was Salinated by Vriddhi Vinay
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
It was you and I in that definitive basin of tea leaves, stew of hot garbage juice slugs its tail and slurps the earth
wet in two chambers of its heart In this one
like Band-Aids and used duct tape pasted like a tongue
on our gooey calves like pepper kisses the shimmy of light on its aqueous arms
like crumpled foils in the other we clog one of its arteries in a cerulean
that hunchbacks grayscale under the scent of stroked flesh
odious like the ocean of lover’s tea over I won’t tell you
about the times I tried to drown myself over that whenever I cough
it still splats wet in the fleshy tunnel it occupies only that in the same space
lives my breath and every kind word I have left for you Once
I was laying on my stomach the sun kissing down the column of my spine
and cupping hands around my ass like it was holding fresh fruit
In the red film born behind my eyelids and the floaters that follow my gaze
like the wrinkled heatwaves of your planet I looked around realized I saw no one
That night I wore the smell of you still home sea salt and something
else, and smelled the same thing when I began to cough for the rest of my life
I wear it to bed at night fishy This story feels better if I misremember it as a perfume
and my kindness as phlegm and the sea as noxious instead of me
VRIDDHI VINAY is a Brooklyn-based writer and researcher who explores the intersection of sexual reclamation, radical survivorship, community between South Asian women, queerness, and memory. They study the intersection of immigration and intimate-partner violence as a student at the CUNY Graduate Center. The ethos of their work surrounds highlighting braveness, archive-keeping, and the surreal. Their work has appeared in Artblog Philadelphia, MUNDI Academic Journal, Kweli Journal, Tilted House, Cosmonauts Avenue, Apiary Magazine, Peach Fuzz, and The Inklette Magazine.
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