Brackish
By Aardhara Chandra
Blue ink bleeds into oil around a floating box of matches near the corner cupboard.
Brackish water slips through the door-gap, spreading across floorboards without depth.
By the third rung, the kitchen table splits along its grain and does not realign.
Salt crust lifts from the refrigerator door and breaks but does not fall.
Cardboard presses into plaster and darkens from within.
A matchbox turns once in the current and stays wrong-sided.
The water does not return.
Aardhra Chandran is a poet from Kerala, India. Her work engages with memory, landscape, and the material textures of everyday life, often moving through spaces shaped by labour, domesticity, and silence. She is interested in how language records physical experience and how ordinary objects hold traces of pressure, change, and residue. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Gulmohur Quarterly, Active Muse, Eunoia Review, Zhagaram, Mosaic Lit Journal, Punch Magazine, and Borderless, among others. She continues to write and submit contemporary lyric poetry.