The arson stratches night’s cornea.
In its blind sight we walk – chimera,
blazing black, and do not we know
how this hue frightens you! You try to
shoot it downface. You make love with it
in the old barn during a pestilence
thinking the dark will purge the ebon.
You clean your genital with its blood.
Tonight it is nothing like those nights.
We, the dark, burn ahead to blindness.
The night sweats. The store in fire opens
its thighs for the looters. Nothing means
nothing as the novel flu season reasons
with the hoary abstracts of this place.
I nod when we pass your white painted house –
Have a beer. Beat your sleep. Memories
either sport the fever or are asleep forever.
A poem stitching the American civil unrest and this pestilence
Kushal Poddar
Illustration Georgina Baillie
Authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and now ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’ (Alien Buddha Press)