https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tearjerker.mp3

Tearjerker

Downspout

from the gargoyle’s mouth,

a city’s sediment

that escaped quenching.

What once was rainwater through

a most baffling sequence of events               is now blood.

The metamorphosis explained

by the days you kneeled

past alleys foraging            for lost goods:

water, love, lattes                       poured into glazed china,

the perfect gift, insignia

that might return the dead                      with the same wistfulness

they left you with.

 

The night went faster than bullet trains

through spider webs of silk thirst.

A tender shape                 you didn’t know the name of,
you longed for. You clung on to frayed muslin

your face had become, legs shipping

ambition across shimmering

lakes like masts of shrewd clouds               tactically flailing

a patch of sky to wet              to call home.

Do you remember visiting the woods where murmurations roost?
Did you find the shadow of your spirit animal there?

 

Last time the green storm came

the iridescence of so many seasons swept up at once,

the planet like a disco ball at a new year party remained

the only witness

to the devouring of light produced by it.

Rainbows stamped
by yanked out band aids,          colored by wavelengths —
monotonic from being administered strong doses of dopamine.
The birches stood alongside you
with chewed barks like nude statues,

their fig leaves fed to unsuspecting rodents.

Children and animals craning            their heads to a shroud

of rubied constellations.         Blood below swathing valleys.

Blood above tracing dots.

How mountains powdered             into roasted sugar.

 

When you recall now, you suffer for salt.

See how you ask me        to blow ash into your eyes.

See how you drink your tears

when you think I’m not looking.


https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Triptych-of-the-Insomniacs-3-am-hungers.mp3

Triptych of the Insomniac’s 3 am hungers

in the city of crackling dirt   the sun tumbled down

almost trampling us over   finally resting behind

the barracks of men who plundered the pink paint

of new rooms guiltless   all this while knowing

there will soon come a time they would breathe in hiccups

the vanishing absolution of distant scents arose from windows

of upturned cellars claiming centuries of chasm and victuals

heirlooms and myrrh   tongues gone awry after mistaking blood

for cocktail   eyes for oysters   how those avocado mouths begged mercy
from clouds that couldn’t be cudgeled to rain   while I got doused
in the storm   my hair stayed erect for days from the electrostatic
charge I gleaned from the dead   I could never get drunk enough

in love   dark wine flowed purple straight through me

and I didn’t have the audacity to say: stay

 

phrased long   smug   sunny   like endless pixels

on low simmer   the words from my grandmother’s

mouth   bristling wisdom and tangy orange   she spoke

in sentences and silences   both: the length of trains

crossing one another on adjacent platforms

you give one person one life   you get two dioramas

and floods infinite   my mother too taking after

her mother   gentility of aging jaw   the red-white flesh

of gums watching for eternity the prodigal tongue
wrestle in the precincts   without knowing the consequences
of slippage   cane twisting   arms coiling   the perverse rock
of my dying force   that entered a molten crater   harnessing

a hardness to make my first mind   there my meditation

ended when the stones on my knuckles tasted like cake

 

my favorite teacher from school visits   at the end

of the dream   tells me after class   if a process becomes its own

celebration it’s one sure way to know: you love it   when I try

writing harder I break the pen’s nib   and ink traces the longest line

on my palm like a child learning about the Nile for the first time

will you take a look at these hands   abstinent through a lifetime

of milk   my friends don’t believe this impossible sainthood

but I did give way to reams of sea   at the point inside the cave

where stalactites and stalagmites met   soon my tongue hissed its way

to the edge of the cliff   overseeing the city of dirt   dazzling with dust

and insoluble fate   I think if I have children   I will ask them

to come here and dine once   for breaking bread on watery heights

taught you the language of a stoic lover   tendered you

in winking halves   the navel-eye of the pleasured monk

 


https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Performance-.mp3

The Performance

1

The stage they sent me to
had an invisible audience. I was directed     to deliver
an impassioned speech.      I took a while
to reason—   in that sacred square ascertained
by plots          of cartesian rhythms,        a turf where love
for the self       and other bodies like a burning mouse       tears
through weeds,    hacking,   heaving        a blunt sickle       to engender
astonishing patterns         of volition—          erosion marks revealed
the anonymous nature of loss:             lumps tousled, reminiscent
of the afterlife of bones:           something between silent mulch
and creosote.

2

Despite so many flickering hypotheses,
the only real finding:           how much I’ve pined
to get something right;                   most of all,     a conclusion.
After I was complimented,     my sweat felt        like dry ice,
acid scent simmering joy                and sheepishness
in pits
where hands begin              for I was certain—    there must live people
that deserved this feeling more.       In my next project, I wish
to bear             conjunctions, the size of haired bodies,
one friendship to another.        I will you        to give
you and me       at times, the finest       of me and you respectively.

3

What is transformation           but transaction burned          at dawn
on peaks of huddling            winter hills:          incentives
your mother gave         for every school test you aced:       mystery
novel, bicycle, diorama    of the solar system,       or terabytes streaming
through a subconscious            as if we were translucent      hard drives
plugged profoundly        into crevasses      of clandestine blue black
screams.       Simple harmonic motions as kismet—       oh I was looking
for this word when they asked me to wrap it up.

4

Minutes later, I’m in the audience         behind stern
plexiglass cloaking disposition       watching a head
trundle across the stage,      muttering,            his face empty
but attire suggesting it could only be      one person;         the theatre’s
booming speakers rang :     you’re a tender thorn, a pickled flower :
the images       perhaps reserved for specimens          witnessing
in harmony        spread over the canvas of years,       their personal
lobotomy,       the words        in the bloody voice
of the saint        who once took immeasurable pains         to birth me.

 


Satya Dash (Twitter: @satya043) is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The Boiler, Anomaly, Chestnut Review, Rhino Poetry, Cincinnati Review, and Diagram, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India.

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