Debmalya Bandyopadhyay

Insomnia

A midnight truck shakes
the clock awake. I remember
my father opening the door

to my head, a lullaby on the piano
tying this memory to kindness.
These days, he struggles

to fall asleep, counts magnitudes
of sheep frozen on the walls
of his aching bedroom. Snow gravitates

outside the window in slow spirals. A car
trims the white edges of the street, muffling
the hip-hop of my century. My father is now

the roundness of a doorknob, but once
he was its urgency. Each night, he waits
for my gentle knock to sound, and each night

we embrace our cavemen past—
leaning into the other’s tales, crafting
out of the hours, a lullaby.

Debmalya Bandyopadhyay (he/him) (Instagram: @halfmoonmilkshake) is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Couplet Poetry, Sontag, The Bangalore Review, Propel, and Anthropocene Poetry, among other literary journals. He can often be found in parks confabulating with local birds.