AURA MARTIN
Found on No Maps
Cento from Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
There are so many stories to tell. I must answer in adverbs and hyphens.
Dirty glass in the window; dirty glasses on the tables – the Pioneer Café was not much. The houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other’s view. We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.
What are you telling me?
Aadam’s eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky. Blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink.
I see no cracks, he intoned mournfully.
A crumbling old man. He had made the mistake of loving in fragments. I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions.
He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Never mind, you don’t know one thing.
In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative. Who says it’s better to do one thing or another? Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. I won’t deny I was disappointed. How can I know these things?
We will drive south south south into the heart of the tumultuous crowds, who will be throwing balloons of paint at each other. The wheels sang their abracadabras to Aadam’s flapping ears.
For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.
Previously published in Fahmidan Journal
Aura Martin is a writer from Missouri. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Butterflies Over Flame (ELJ Editions, forthcoming 2022), the chapbook, Those Embroidered Suns (Lazy Adventurer Publishing, 2020) and the micro-chapbook, Thumbprint Lizards (Maverick Duck Press, 2019). Aura’s work has appeared in EX/POST MAGAZINE, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. In her free time, she likes to run, take road trips, and interview writers. Find Aura on Twitter @instamartin17.