#Title
after Meena Alexander
PANDEMIC NOCTURNE 1: December Dirge
LAGNAJITA MUKHOPADHYAY
that single spot, shunyo , a hole that is filled
to its circumference, I drive and the sun is bigger
than I’ve ever seen and orange, look directly into it
or, i had to write a poem to go along with the first
one: the TV on mute, I begged for a sound,
recovering from yet another flood, this house never
shook
my grandma died when I was back in
Nashville, heading out for a fire, thinking of
rising into air I try to pour the tears back into
my head again
in Bangla, death is a hit to the face, mara gechhe , to
deprive, thirsty, a pain that is expected yet empty,
and I know, Didai lost someone to drink cha with
“it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot
where the echo is able to give, in its own language,
the reverberation of the work in the alien one,” or
mistranslate
it was the day of a sudden freeze, three nights
that would kill all the buds, cover your flowers,
they said, last frost isn’t till April and it is too soon
when my grandma dies, no one here speaks of
blood and i can’t tell you because i stopped picking
up when you call crying; it’s not about you anymore
everyone here declares life to be theirs only, not a chain,
a whole country that robs us of grief or last rites and a
photo of me by the body, dressed in petals, all in white
a cancer, a stone inside, and a few days of nothing or so quick,
expected until not, and we curse the empty place we inhabit
and wish we were home. what have we done?
Set your feet into the broken stones
and this red earth and pouring rain.
For us there is no exile.
not another poem, but a litany of leaving, or moving,
and you haunt me when there are bigger things, as if I
have grown used to acceptance, a way to lie and forget
these kinds of things call for storm shelters, somewhere to
keep the lights on at night, i recall Baba once telling me
that he would wake and cry in the dark, who had died
then?
she used to bathe me, pour water over my head, and I look
outside and it’s the first ray of sun in a while, lighting up
the pink cherry blossom unaware of the cold
we cannot go home now either, and I can’t tell you
why we stay like I don’t know if I loved you, no
one lives upstairs anymore, what’s the point?
there is no end in sight to this, lost paradise, I drive away
again to where I do not have to think, a lamp placed near
her head in Kolkata, from the power outage in Nashville
meanwhile white folks argue with my skin and feel
nothing, shunyo , a different emptiness than ours, full of
clean void, masked, a house of souls, a doorway stopped by
clouds.
jani dekha hobe , I know I will see you, they say when
they don’t really know, not as if we come back as something
else or if we feel them in the room still or not at all?
why i give it up again and again, to come to another
swift end, or hold it too long, longer than i want to, and
what is the point, you only pretended like you knew
guddy , the last person to call me that name, goodbye,
what is in the air, they ask, and it must be a vacancy
sign and a lengthy distance, or a road full of
potholes
silent home, we keep ourselves away, tell me, choto didai ,
what does it mean? what are you saying? small and lump
forming in back of throat, furniture sucked through the
window
there are no walls between us no longer, the problem is
you have never seen war on this soil, you fight
yourself. you should see what it looks like to really lose
they come here to try again, abhiman , an anger for something
you love, a sense of disappointment but trust, and not your kind,
i never liked your friends, you were cruel to strangers
when my grandma died, it was just like another day,
another time i could not go back while you walk around
and no one tells you that you’re wrong, false conjugate
time goes on, does not just end when these things
happen, nothing, nothing ends the world except
the things that do, I just want to speak to her
again
time is grief’s first denial, not flying through ash but
lifting mid-song to meet you, shunyo or nothing,
jani dekha hobe , what will I do with all this time?
Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is the author of the books This Is Our War (Penmanship Press, 2016)and Everything Is Always Leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 2019), and a poetry album I Don’t Know Anyone Here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters’ candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, La Piccioletta Barca , and Cream City Review , among others.
REBECCA HAQUE
Ask me not of Grief.
For I have been burnt by its friendly fire
with blood and bits of oozing mortal flesh
spun flaky and ashen by its biting cold breath.
That was in the past.
Grief dug its teeth into me once more in the Pandemic
with my mother gone into hallowed ground
On the tenth of December twenty-twenty.
Those interlinked circles,
those zeroes in the last month of that year
became black holes in my brain
With my mother gone
Without a kiss,
without a last embrace,
without the promise of forgiveness and grace.
Rebecca Haque is a Killam Scholar and independent educator. She is a poet, writer, and translator affiliated with Multi-Ethnic Literature of the World [#MELOW], Asia-Pacific Writers & Translators Association [#APWT], and New York Writers Workshop [#NYWW].
DESIGN: AMREETA LETHE