In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to the 200,000 women raped during the War of Independence by eulogizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were frequently ostracized by their families and social circles. —Nayanika Mookherjee Do you remember what you were doing when they came for you?…
on the wall by the fireplace we can fill it with stones, flowers, toenails, pebbles of shit or scat or something else Anglo-Saxon and indispensable. No books on Texas birds, no botany, the rock is called a batholith, stands 1,825 feet, a large, solid granite dome where white men fled captivity,…
Chaos ignites temperaments. Charge out each day and plunder. Bones be buried. Bones be broken. Renounce blood, a larger black. Each morning renews chaste vows, only to be unbridled by afternoon. The way an ox would plow a field drunk youngsters prove their anger. A cadence of steel coffins hidden by…
Furious snow cardinals & diode array. Methuselah walks by me in coats. Vast brackets of light. Those sugar packets on the road: a branch encased in ice would almost seem to indicate them. The first bomb opens itself in space. By red by half-silvered light—“to home.” How that a life were but a place?…
Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock, take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards, your toes point, turn out in stance, your…
We would like to grow herbs, cooking herbs and chamomile and lavender, and keep birds, farm fish, collect dogs and cats and horses. There isn’t enough room in the apartment. We need a plant to cover the litter boxes in the bathroom. There’s an unfinished birdcage you’ve built in the bedroom and now you’ve started…
for Grace There’s an oak leaf, one caught in the latch on the door lodged like a letter in a letter box. It knocks slowly, eight-prongs the wind tips it back, head leaning away stem like a tail, wind knocking softly turning over the life of a tough brown leaf. Stronger than a grasping hand,…
It must be just bad translating, like Robot Chicken and Fly Head; but thoughts of the three— Walnut tumors? Moo shu pus? Fire-bombed baby with broccoli?—make my hunger high- tail it like Iron Man in a thunderstorm. The Pair of Love Shrimp moan syphilitically. Seafood Commissioner takes bribes to okay rancid clams. The Sauteed Happy…
So you think you can bear me, now, do you? Carry my limp body through centuries Of sand (soft, made from ground shells, or souls As some have claimed), likewise, across that blue That is the paradise-never you deem We shall inhabit, in which I don cream And no clothes, or just a muslin dream-come-true…
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