Navel-Gazing
by Archana Sridhar
We awaken at 1 AM to the sound of a man shouting, then a thud. After that, we wonder if the bodies would begin to fall more often. Another friend attends a virtual funeral, watching another family cry and moan, helpless – without the ability to hug or touch or pat. This kind of silent witnessing must be teaching us a lesson, right? A woman at work always pronounces COVID as COVERT. That’s why we’re staying indoors while the creatures ravage humanity outdoors. Viruses are creatures, right?
After the man fell from above, I went back to sleep. I dreamt that I reached into myself and pulled out strands of white cotton – first with my fingers, then with a small tool, pulling and pulling like a magician’s scarf up his sleeve. Unpleasant though it was, I felt validated. I knew it was in there for the taking. Like an upholstered coach leaking feathers, there was evidence. Each mass of entwined cloth tugged and removed and disposed of meant order and cleanliness, and a way back to my own bodily center of self and its excretions.
The images kept flashing by and I followed their lead like one half of a couple locked in a cosmic dance. I was inside a massive grain silo, the delicate bands of wooden siding sloping up to a cathedral-like ceiling of posts and pillars – expectant hands open for the harvest to arrive. Click by click, the mental slide show kept on. Thatched roofs on a barren landscape. The same slim wooden bands like my belly – now filled out with hay and remnants of grain.
The navel-gazing continued until I saw a woman cross the street – a lady in red, in the smartest satin dress I’d ever seen. From ten stories up, my gaze shifted from my belly button to her belted waist and metallic handbag. All shine, she shimmied across the street to the bank. An old man held the door for her with a flourish. In his other hand was an enormous spotted Great Dane. The dog looked up at my window and barked loudly, interrupting my videoconference with his racket.
I saw my co-worker in her square, seeing me in my square, as I pivoted from staring out the balcony window to staring at her in her computer window. So I flew out the window and landed in a bookstore, mask on, hands clean. Rather than the blank pages I had wanted, the open-faced notebook had dots along gridlines – a pixelated canvas, proto-lines for drawing by connecting dots like a game of structure and animation. The gray dots turned into primary colors the longer I stared – blue, yellow, red, black swam around my eyewalls, coloring everything and revealing the layers that were already there.
Archana Sridhar is an Indian-American poet and university administrator living in Toronto, Canada. Archana focuses on themes of meditation, race, motherhood, and diaspora in her poetry and flash writing. Her work has been featured in The Puritan, The Hellebore, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Renderings” is available through 845 Press, and her work can be found at archanasridhar.com.
