The Well
By Aardhara Chandran
The bucket drops past moss
and the green damp of the wall, striking water.
Down where the light fails,
three rings of baked clay sit bedded in river gravel.
Groundwater slows through mud and silt,
shedding iron.
Bucket fills, cold and still.
The rope tightens, leaving an iron taste on the palm.
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.