Supritha Rajan
Summer 2025 | Poetry
from Mosaic
Stone 55:
Pushing my cart through the interminable
cereal aisle in that idling pace made
pleasurable by reverie and accompanied
(or should I say precipitated)
by the languorous tones of Sade singing
nothing can come, nothing can come
between us, I perceive objects
from the visible world stream before me
like a set of moving pictures imprinted
on the eye without conscious will or assent
as my breath—humid under my face mask—
condenses on my glasses and the romantic mist
gradually clouds my vision while I stand
still in the cereal aisle as if I were
standing on a street in the midst
of heavy fog with my mouth open
waiting for a sugared rose to be piped
on my tongue in the bright colors of
sublime transfiguration or, if not that,
hollowed out like a fruit loop. Instead
I suck on zinc lozenges, bend and lean
my arms and chest over the handle of my cart
the way, many years ago, a professor—
tall and commanding with his stentorian voice—
leaned over a lectern and the pendulum of modernity
swung between the Edo and Meiji periods.
Supritha Rajan is associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and featured on such websites as Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in such journals as The Threepenny Review, The Cortland Review, Narrative, Bennington Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions (online), New England Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, Washington Square Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.