The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Ellen Kombiyil’s “Histories of the Future Perfect”

FALLING AS AN ACT OF FORGIVENESS

ah yes on the bus trick photography
makes me float unperturbed against backdrop
sky still the wind yammers in patterns
translate to surface tension the wind’s
continuous unpause there’s nowhere
to land the road comes out like a Y
you really do have to crane tiny neck
muscles to see no one’s coming the bus
slows to a stop the same corner where once
a white poodle nipped my gloved hand the force
of its jaw expressed an equation
I could never think to write down

This selection comes from Ellen Kombiyil’s book Histories of the Future Perfect, available now from Great Indian Poetry Collective. Purchase your copy here!

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of “Histories of the Future Perfect” (2015). A recent transplant from Bangalore, India, where she lived for nearly 11 years, she is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, an mentorship-model literary press specializing in innovative books from India/Indian diaspora. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has read, performed or taught workshops at the annual Prakriti Poetry festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore. Originally from Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Midway Iterations(Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), Fall (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015), and The Ep[is]odes: a reformulation of Horace (Noctuary Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Menacing Hedge, LIT, West Wind Review, Ninth Letter, Phoebe, and others. A weightlifter, artist, teacher, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she is the Vice President and Associate Editor of Sundress Publications.