DANDAKA HYPOCENTER MUSEUM

Arya Vishin

Abhisarika Nayika. Basohli style, perhaps at Mankot, ca. 1700, Collection Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad

last year they started sculpting these tigers from blistered light.
all cauterized no difference between static display & mother’s pores
under our feet when you tread on her ground. mother bites back
& I keep waking orange & blue & never white.
at first
it was just a golden deer with two heads lifting
its dappled crowns & opening its two mouths to show
three rows of triangle teeth. & we were screaming all sickly
chartreuse & rose-ringed, beak-locked, shifting in place, singed
pinkbrown scars & feral & unspeaking in exhibit, singing
separation in exile & one voice above it all for when the earth opens
its abyssal maw & swallows brown cowgirl poet outlaw

🦌🌧️