Rendering

Archana Sridhar

We drafted our dream-house

in the cane-sugar

sweet of youth

changing colors with the click of a pen

to match the rainbow horizons

of our imaginings.

We rolled and unrolled

onion-skin graph paper, sketching

squares for a library and an art studio,

counting out cubes for a spa

and a wildlife sanctuary

measuring inches for a garage

to hold our jet-cars.

Little girls with big feminist dreams,

it was too early to know

how friendship spins tenuous -

a thread across cities,

countries - how rawness

transubstantiates

into pure white sugar cubes, 

adulthood laid out

on an architect’s table.

Mundane kitchen renos infused

with spirits distilled

from clumps of gristle

dripping into tallow made thick

with practical things;

bone and muscle and blood

clarified like

ghee

into their almost

unrecognizable hosts:

Our grown-up bodies in a new life

rendered

drip by drip,

square by square.

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Archana Sridhar is a poet and university administrator in Toronto, Canada. Archana focuses on themes of race, meditation, motherhood, and trauma in her writing. Her poetry and flash writing has been featured in The Puritan, The Temz Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Renderings” is forthcoming with 845 Press and her writing can be found at www.archanasridhar.com

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