SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA
Ghazal with Praise for An Ocean
An ocean is concavity. Again, I evoke the nebulize of ocean
folding into ocean to bless our feet. Give me a widening ocean
before a thousand names for God. The songbirds are passing
over a prospect of blue prayer despite gravity. Say an ocean
may become a holy carriage for feet. I want to move towards
the direction of my ancestors. The trace of lineage in an ocean
in flux from Karachi into swift waters is ceremonial. I praise
motion by wanting to be a part of nautical miles. An ocean
lingers in the body of my grandmother like the sounds in a conch
shell. The folding of hands like a cusp of two tides in an ocean
is an offer of prayer. We arrive at our destination by the smell
of a proximate ocean. I want the singing to carry us as far as ocean
currents carry nutrients to organisms underwater. My grandmother
makes paper lanterns with shapes akin to waves in the ocean.
To be saved from elegy means being saved by an ocean.
We name the intimacy holding our beloveds an ocean.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a writer from Canada. She has been awarded the inaugural Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Waxwing Magazine, The Normal School, Muzzle Magazine, Quiddity, and elsewhere. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow writer-in-residence (2018-19) at The University of Stirling. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the author of the chapbook Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press).