Eutectic Alloy

by Vinita Agrawal

The steel plate

corrosion-resistant.

Hard, smooth-rimmed,

gleaming like the sea at noon.

Its steel, perfectly balanced between iron and carbon.

30 mm thick.

The kind that wouldn't split if it fell to the ground.

The kind that would last for more years 

than your hope of seeing your children's children.

It doesn't speak.

Reflects, with minor distortions,

whoever is at its rim. 

And when you eat from it,

it bears every mark 

but cleans up real well.

Never shows stains.

If I didn't have this ball of crumpled velvet inside my heart,

that oscillates between crushed darkness 

and silvery frost 

I might well be this steel plate.

98 percent iron, 2 percent carbon.

*********

Author of Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique/Sampark) and The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press, USA) and The Silk Of Hunger ( AuthorsPress, Delhi), Vinita Agrawal is a Mumbai based, award winning poet and writer. She is the Contributing Editor for www.thewomaninc.com. She won the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award 2015 for literary excellence, NJ, USA. Her poems have appeared in Asiancha, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review, Pea River Journal, Open Road Review, Stockholm Literary Review, Poetry Pacific and other national and international journals. Her poems have been widely anthologized in Indo-Australian compilations. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011, awarded first prize in the Wordweavers Contest 2014, commendation prize in the All India Poetry Competition 2014 and won the 2014 Hour of Writes Contest thrice.  She has read at SAARC events in Delhi and Agra at Hyderabad for the U.S. Consulate to celebrate Women Poets Of India, at Delhi for Delhi Poetree, and at Mumbai for Cappucino Readings. She can be reached at https://www.pw.org/content/vinita_agrawal or at www.vinitawords.com.