Sheri Vandermolen

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Monsoon Daze

Sedentary at your desk,
you hear the perpetual drips
of time's restive clepsydra
tocking down your wall.

Monsoonal swaths
streak down the not-quite-sealed pane
of a window whose frame groans,
under the waterlogged oppression
of summer's ceaseless rains.

You close your gray-sky eyes,
breathe into the mind's crevices,
letting day's accreted grit
surge into convoluted sluices
now inundated
with other selfish debris.

Again you breathe.

Sheri Vandermolen has served, for fifteen years, as editor in chief of Time Being Books, an independent publishing company based in St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated summa cum laude, in 1990, and relocated to Bangalore, India, in 2008, where she explored for six years, via camera and pen (including at the Maha Kumbh Mela). Her verse pieces have been published in various international literary journals, including Ashvamegh, Camel Saloon, Contemporary Literary Review India, Earthen Lamp Journal, Muse India, Jersey Devil Press, Papercuts, Taj Mahal Review, and Verse-Virtual. Her work is also comprised in Veils, Halos, and Shackles: An International Anthology on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women.