October’s Future Friday 10/25- Janiru Liyanage

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The last Friday of the month we feature an incredible young creative talent age 18 and under in our Future Fridays!

Janiru Liyanage is a 14 year old Sri-Lankan Australian student and poet, who currently lives in Sydney and attends high school. He is the 2019 junior winner of the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, a national poetry competition, & loves the Oxford comma, hyphens, & cats! – His work is forthcoming in Driftwood Press and The Journal Of Compressed Creative Arts, is a prolific participant and winner of poetry slams, and having just begun his personal poetic journey, Janiru is eager to find his own voice in his work.

 

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It’s The Hunger

The inside of heaven is garland with all the animals
we made extinct
The inside of me is garland with glass bottles that
cooled too early to have any noticeable shape:
a single kidney that may also be a liver,
an ambre lung;
The ghost of a thrush sings its songs each night
and I listen just to fall asleep –
this living
this body: my insides scraped out by a single
index finger
I bare the same tenderness of a small child
decomposing into his grave – the heaviest breath
is the last one  –  there are men
who still worship black moons
they light candles and draw circles around their feet
These men seek out my insides so hungrily
I’m sure that whatever moves them must also move
us – slouching into the night just to wake into
TV light with many Sinhala women singing old
songs; I forgot all the words I repeated last night –
still, there is the scent of tobacco and maple after all these
months –
I am still the ugly boy I began as – nightly crying for
mothering and suckling on everything I find
I’m sure something or someone is summoning me – still,
I am deflecting all their wishes;
the first few times were out of curiosity – now, my body steps
out of me and I have to leash it from snorting, smoking
or drinking anything – it’s the hunger that stops me
and the hunger that starts it too;
A single thumb placed under my tongue – I recite the
smallest prayer; even that I’ve forgotten:
Oh Lord, something, something, You are mine, I am yours,
take me, take me, I am waiting and will be