In the Cafe heart cup coffee

Monroe waited a long time for me

and then turned pale on my disregard to her.

I couldn’t help but stare at the dead wall

Bouncing off everything that was thrown at it

The rainbow lights, the high-pitched rattle

The conversations putting off their masks for a while.

Everything was coming back as more questions

From the other side of the confession box

Before offering a solution that

It didn’t know would work well.

I searched for a hospitable crevice

In the room full of alien corners.

But I couldn’t find any. We were all very

unapologetically unknown to each other

like the dead chicken to the wine

– both served together on the same luncheon.

* * *

Amit Radha Krishna Nigam works as an IT professional out of Hyderabad and has been writing poetry for the last 15 years. Besides poetry, he also writes short stories and general articles on computer research, economic and other subjects (http://porterfolio.net/arkn). He was a runner-up at the Writing Knights Press July 2012 poetry event in Ohio, and he is the author of English language poetry collections Musings of Desire (2015), Pilgrims (2014) and Awake wonder and lost (2008).