Front Camera
The ceramic crown on your upper molar
Behind creamish, crooked enamel
Hidden by a pout.
Rounder, shorter noses
That flare and protrude
Like it’s not your business.
The common blackish brownish iris
Melanin flavour not in season,
Not seen as anything worth seeing into.
Ears are the same of course,
Nothing special, nothing unusual.
It’s not an Egyptian point of view.
Double chin. Double chin.
Hide it by raising or angling.
Pretend you’re a swan.
Shoulders are flexible things,
Hunched, straight, tensed, dropped
All purpose support, free of charge.
Then – Uh Oh. It’s adult content.
NSFW warning! Blurry stuff ahead.
Dim the screen brightness.
You turned. Why?
I see an arm. Strong
covered in layers. A wide canvas
to fill with an imaginative identity.
Then the mountain peaks are visible
The summit looks interesting
Why are you crossing your arms?
Then the smaller hills. Bounded
by ridges and valleys. An occasional plateau
whose altitude keeps changing.
Some terrain is hard to define
With irregularities, non-standard measurements
Harder still to live with and love.
Ok. I’ll stop now.
You can stop squirming.
The rest will remain hidden.
But you missed out on a lot.
A lush forest that hides a beautiful waterfall
That frequently causes floods unfortunately.
Nevermind. It’s all there for another time.
It was always all there as is, you know.
Just explore a little
by switching off.
Sharvani is an engineer living and working in Bangalore. She has been writing since school and hopes to become better at it soon. Her work has appeared in a few online journals like Enchanting Verses, Kritya, Spark and once in print in Reading Hour.
