Nothing Fully Ours
Art: Hiranmayi Krishnakumar
Poem: ‘There’s a chair by the window / waiting for someone who doesn’t arrive / in this version. / The cushion sinks on its own. / It has good memory foam. / The fan spins like it’s trying to erase the century.’
Was this house always this confident?
Or did time stitch it tighter
each time someone misremembered it?
There’s a chair by the window
waiting for someone who doesn’t arrive
in this version.
The cushion sinks on its own.
It has good memory foam.
The fan spins like it’s trying to erase the century.
It fails gracefully.
Who left these bricks half explaining themselves?
One tells me it used to be a jail,
another claims a bakery.
Both smell like power? authority?
Why does the staircase cough before I step on it?
There are signs, yes
not for direction,
just for decoration.
Did the kettle whistle from an invisible room?
Steam rising from absence.
It smells like salt and something expensive.
The past here
has been swept under archival rugs.
I can feel it crunch if I walk barefoot.
I sit.
The bench groans.
Not out of pain,
but habit.
What happens to a place
when it’s seen too many versions of itself?
And what happens to me
if one of them remembers
better than I do?
***
Hiranmayi Krishnakumar is from Kochi and is currently pursuing a B.Arch degree in RV College of Architecture. Her work often resonates with blurring the lines between memory and observation, using poetry as my medium to inhabit these spaces that no longer exist in the same way. She is in the process of publishing a zine of her poetry and digital art works. You can find her on Instagram: @hirrr.k and X: @hirrrk2003.
