Dispellations: Manomaya Kosha

By ANNA MARIA HONG

You can’t defeat nature, you can only
work with it. Just as speculating
                           on a perpetrator’s motives                                 —sex as
                           power, power as hard exercise
                           of a phantom sense 
                           of impotence,
                           blah, blah, blah—is trackless, so too is
asking what does it want,                  it wants
far less than you or I could 
ever envision
                            in our least released 
                            lives. It means no harm. 
                            It needs a warm
                            host. We invoke genre to accommodate 
                            events terrible and intimate,
          to give fleshly narrative to cataclysms
          of globular dimension—                            private/public,                        macro/micro
          —samskara, samskara, these fictions sizzling through 
                                                                            the World Wide Gap,
                                                                            racist, replicant, and species-specific.

Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize; and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, and Sonnets from the American: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.

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