Volume 6 | Issue 3 | Oct-November
2012 |
Almost Home
Lalita Noronha
At certain times
the body feels lithe,
air rare, thin, breath contained within
a cage of bones.
An airless, weightless blink of no one,
or everyone who has gone on
to somewhere.
At such times
I long to hold still,
watch the play of light and dark,
but my chest fills,
breath demands escape,
lungs suffocate and I exhale
a puff of air that blows away
everyone who returns
to somewhere,
leaving me alone.
Lalita Noronha - Born in India, Lalita Noronha has a Ph.D. in Microbiology and is a widely published scientist, poet, writer and teacher. Her literary work has appeared in over eighty journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Baltimore Sun, The Christian Science Monitor, Catholic Digest, Gargoyle, and Get Well Wishes (Harper Collins.) She has twice won the Maryland Literary Short Story Award, a Maryland Individual Artist Award, and the National League of American Pen Women Award, among others. She is a fiction editor for the Baltimore Review and teaches both science and a humanities course (Glimpses of the Culture of India) based on her short story collection, Where Monsoons Cry. Her poem "Bar Talk" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011. Often featured on National Public Radio, “The Signal,” she is working on her first novel.
e-mail: drlnb@comcast.net
Web: http://www.lalitanoronha.com
