Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad – Two-note drone

Remember that time you said that flying

was trusting the wind,

that a moth or a bird,

or an archaeopteryx in its time,

just took to the skies, knowing

it would be buoyed.

A reckless leap—

no trace of hesitation

to weigh its body down.

It is the same here,

on this green wedge

where the wind is a whistling force

and I feel airborne though I have

no wings, and the lighthouse fears

for my waif-body as I toe

the beaded edges of the cliff.

Brush and stone spill

into the mouth of oceans.

Sometimes, it is hard to remember

you are not a bird.

But I don’t think that is you—

you who are always sky-ready

in your metal armour,

flight bones primed as you thunder

A320s off the tarmac.

We are sky-sirens—
I taxi off the page,
you glide into the clouds.
This is where we will skim together,
arms outstretched
like when we were children:
airborne, not knowing
if feathers will sprout
but leaping anyway
to meet the glitter below.

-Banjo Paterson

How do I look this conundrum in the eye, the

sting every time I bare my face—not native

enough—a ferret that has crept out of the grasses.

When will I convince myself I am allowed to stand tall

wear my hard-earned victories with pride just as

much as anyone else who has toiled against the grain?

Am I the face of the future, and is it something that were

desired, or am I something to be awkwardly waved

into a corner—a token, a temporary reprieve and

a problem to be tamed. Who am I in whom much has rippled,

a vessel to hold so many disparate worlds in

bronzed silence. Will I ever find my place in the

lines of this red earth, I who have floated on the breeze

so far and so often that now I am from

nowhere, of no land, and all I hang upon the boughs

of memory are the curled and distressed maps of

lands and rivers too far-flung, childhood blossoms

whose shape and feel I forget, their pollen laden

with the prints of faded mountains and trees.

I am the limbo child of another earth, and no earth, the

sky above me filled with rose-ringed parrots,

asking if I would answer back. I have answered,

I say, with both ink and dignity, even though I hold back

often—and words seem to fail me now and again.

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© Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a widely published and awarded Indian-Australian artist and poet with works in Cordite, Black Bough Poetry UK, The Salons, Poetry Sydney, and other publications. She has performed internationally, including at Oxford Poetry Circle, The Surrey Laureate Lounge, and Charing Cross Library UK. She won the 2025 Bankstown Poetry Slam (Sydney Writers Festival), the 2025 Bread and Butter Slampionship at the Opera House, the 2025 Don Bank Short Fiction Cup, and the Curator’s Award in the 2025 Grieve Anthology. A multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, she is the author of Patchwork Fugue (Atomic Bohemian Press 2024) and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys (Hedgehog Poetry Press 2024, winner of the Little Black Book Competition). Her new collection is forthcoming from 5 Islands Press (2026). Her artworks have been published on the covers of Yale Divinity School, Pithead Chapel, Amsterdam Quarterly, and numerous other literary magazines. She is the current and inaugural Writer in Residence at Woollahra Libraries. Find her @oormilaprahlad (X) and @oormila_paintings (Instagram)