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Ellen Kombiyil

Land Carnivore

If I could

spread my scent

among the wilds

if I could

in summer

distinguish more

than the smell

of fish, mussels

hiding in ice caves

would be easy 

to pluck and I

might swim again

 

             in awkwardness

             my giant

             inefficient paddling

Ellen_Kombiyil_headshot - Ellen Kombiyil.jpg

 

 

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro-chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work can be found in North American Review, The Minnesota Review, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. A Co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing first books from India and the diaspora, she served as an editor, publisher, and teaching artist there through 2019. She currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.

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Bear Review

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