Missing People by Vaishnavi Pusapati

With time
the list of people
I miss is ongoing, growing.
My memories have become open
postcards to people with lost addresses;
and what would I say, to all these people arrested,
in time, captured into a painting in the past when the landscapes
where we met have altered. We ourselves have alternations made and only
by some coincidence shall we meet again, likely, in the unlikeliest of spaces and
hence I travel like a postcard, stamped, and empty, to will upon this hollow chance, this possibility.
I do the messy work of cleaning after people who have left behind words, I collect them into empty pots, as keepsakes.

Vaishnavi Pusapati is a physician writer previously published in Brussels Review, Roanoke Review, Bare Hill Review, Redrosethorns, Heron’s Nest, among others. Her poems are her joy and she loves to chance upon interesting literature. She hopes to publish a book compiling her work, one day.