New Poetry by Radhika Kapoor

Drink While It’s Hot, Honey

Tea

is what you’d made

that first night

I was kicked out.

Hot like salt

water is hot,

but sweet

where salt

water is not.

Um

here’s the um again,

don’t laugh

please. You um at your students

when

it’s on tip of:

ophidian tongue

but not yet on:

teeth, I saw —

Saw-toothed like razors (I’d know.)

Even before It begins

here I am.

Odometering, tasseographing, guessing

when your metaled mouth-margins, your face-hole

will purse to a point,

pimpling to a pop.

It Happens.

- © Radhika Kapoor 2021

Radhika Kapoor lives and writes in India and America, chasing rainy weather wherever she can find it. She is a lawyer by training and holds degrees from the National Law School, Bangalore, and Harvard Law School. Among her recent achievements is learning to love dogs, especially the large kind. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Five on the Fifth Lit Mag, New World Writing, and Bending Genres.