• Post category:Poetry
  • Reading time:1 min read

Annesta

BY PADMA THORNLYRE

Photo by Chermiti Mohamed | From Unsplash

A college student wearing 
green fatigues & a red silk  

grape-cluster blouse claims  

her wooden chair at the head 
of a table of coffee & books. 

I inhale her clove necklace,  
her palms sticky with brown 
turkey figs & I wd speak up  

but, mid-gesture, I lose my 
tongue to this green girl, this 

girl of teakwood eyes, while 

my helpless ears absorb  
myriad bells and trumpets.

Padma Thornlyre

Padma Thornlyre has published 10 books of poetry—most recently his Anxiety Quartet in 2020-21, and one book of translations from the Ukrainian of Lyudmyla Diadchenko, Magnetic Storms (2023). He has also written a novel which is so noncommercial that even interested agents take a pass. He designs books for the poetry co-op, Turkey Buzzard Press, and occasionally takes on multi-arts projects under the Mad Blood banner. He was born and spent most of his life in Colorado, but now lives in northern New Mexico. His poetry and translations have been published in Poetry, Yellow Silk, Rattle, and Gargoyle, among others. New translations of Diadchenko will be featured in Ginosko Literary Journal Issue 35 (nine poems), and in Ezra: an online journal of translation Winter 2026 (six poems).

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