Cat in the window
examines the snowflakes that float—
marks of art in the winter dark
It’s a Christmas Eve in my homeland
the things to come
waiting to be unwrapped
By MARC VINCENZ
For your ears, in your exile, in your comfort zone, in which you fly unscathed, unsheathed, into the scarlet reveries, in your scarf and hands where the hum of time seems like a downpour, or the dizzying heights of mountain crags, the sharp flashes of light that become visible in the no-longer-already night. Here in the deep darkening center, in the storm of spring or the silence and its willow tree, in the serenade on the veranda, or the poplar spires, in the furrows and the silt, do you believe the true believer may be risen from the dead? Hold the fire and the ever-transforming, the endless sky or the filthy sewage which spews out under the shadows, which they say settles the soul. You will emerge as you do, in all your manifolds, in the siege and in amongst the vagabonds and the wayfarers, the heavenly debate in the afterworld—all those among us searching for safety. Here we are heathens, the lamb and temples that rise over the hills. Yesterday had us back among you in the proud fight, where the stained glass was the mirror and shattered our pride. Earn your trust, they say. Weren’t we the ones who lifted the dead, who muttered their prayers accordingly, where every motion was a wavering—so estranged we were in the day’s end—the words, the word, the faces were etched in their smiles. Take the last sheaf of paper and hold it up to the window. Take the benevolence of any kindred spirit and let it arise. The book ends somewhere.
after Jamaica Kincaid
be honest with your psychiatrist about how the meds have kept you from cumming:
even while fantasizing about Priyanka Chopra—her cascading curls,
tumbling down her shoulders; don’t feel ashamed after your lover has suggested
other ways to be intimate: like learning how to speak Urdu so that on sleepless nights
you can recite Ghalib’s ghazals to her while holding hands near the mango tree;
on the rare chance you’re not awake, smash the snooze button;
continue dreaming about a world where you don’t perceive that therapy
is just for white folks; forget what your family says; you can’t shake off suicidal
If the heart is a temple,
each statue will be broken.
But I have practiced idolatry:
loved the creature more than
the creator, whom I can’t see.
There’s a hole where the sun
should be. It has entered me,
along with the cloud and river.
By AMAR MITRA
Translated by ANISH GUPTA
ONE
Ask Kartik. He will show you.
Ask Kartik how Hrithik Roshan, the film star, sings, how he walks, and Kartik, the neighbourhood tailor, will show you how he sings and how he walks.
Ask him to show you how superstar Shah Rukh Khan proposes to matinee queen Kajol, when and how he delivers those romantic dialogues, and Kartik’s imitation of Khan will make your jaw drop.
Chrome glinted
sunrise, bumpers, rear views.
Backside of cars parked full of sleep
just an hour past.
I went so deeply into the dream,
it might have been a different future.
La vita nuova seeded in an old frame.
Es de madrugada.
It is dawn always dawn
the sun breaking through
the breaking of the soil.
The faint smell of rain from irrigated dirt
crusts of mud from the crop rows
comes home with my father
on his pants and beneath his fingernails.
There is no time to complain,
only time to move as fast as you can
through the rows of low-lying shrubs,
the tall stalks.
The people of the fields leave
the complaining to the rest of us,
driving by on our way to work,
school,
the gym.
By ELLYN GAYDOS
I live on a wooded road posted with NO TRESPASSING PROPERTY OF GEORGE FUDGE signs. In addition to being a large landowner, George Fudge rents out dumpsters, and is rumored to be an ex-con and confirmed to be a minister. When the season is right, he plows snow. He’s plowed my driveway more than once for free. I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing outside the dollar store, kids’ jumpers and XL T-shirts fluttering brightly.
I work on a small vegetable farm carved out of hayfields owned by the local high school and woods owned by the local commune. The other young farmers and I grow food for a hundred families that come each week to get shares of vegetables, which begin in spring as ephemeral greens and end in winter as sacks of beets and potatoes.
Home from work with a heavy trash bag of compost for my pigs, I find the escaped animals locked in the chicken coop. They got out in the unwatchful summer afternoon, their snouts bending up the bottom of the fence to roam undeterred past illegible PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. They were escaping their squalid pen out of pure misery, I think. I had been watching them get shocked trying to push through, seeming genuinely angry, for the past few days, putting off moving the fence out of laziness or a desire to escape the drudgery of what I’d taken on.
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