CONJOINT

by Imogen Arate

When the waves come

you will remember my name

When the mountains melt

in the blaze of your misdeeds

you’ll beg for another chance

though you squandered them

in your privileged stance

calling your destruction 

into being you sealed every

egress to my escape and

annihilate yourself in turn

Then our gaze will meet again

and you’ll recognize your

anguish in my eyes

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses (https://poetsandmuses.com), a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her works were most recently published on The New Verse News and in Consilience and Rigorous. You can find her @PoetsandMuses on Twitter and Instagram.

AGGRIEVED

by Karan Kapoor

Many patients across India have died when hospitals suddenly ran out of oxygen. Credit: Atul Loke for The New York Times, May 16, 2021

I

An old friend's father whom I once called father

is now dying. We're hunters who cannot hunt

oxygen for him, or her or the many theys, 

nor god, and the men who bought the internet

know we've tried to find both. Anything below

hundred minus five is a potential threat. 

He is at 51 and going down with the sun.

We carry time on our shoulders as it bleeds.

Souls leave bodies; leaves in autumn, 

pus from an abscess. Everywhere birds 

appear; everywhere there's song.

II

Our premier is deaf without being mute.

Isn't he guilty of all the good he did not do?

Sometimes the body astonishes the mind.

He visits a gurdwara to pray, to pay homage 

to Guru Teg Bahadur, extends greetings 

to a nation dying. He bows to him: a guru

respected globally for his courage and his

efforts to serve the downtrodden, a guru who

refused to bow to tyranny and injustice. 

We're trying to balance on the fence 

between irony and contempt.

III

Some pray for their fathers to be relieved,

some want them to live no matter. The one

who now stands in the queue for oxygen will 

soon stand in the queue for crematoriums.

The sun scorches us like a lover we've

wronged, pissing fire on us. In turn, 

our shaved heads threaten the moon.

Everyone we love plunges deep into a sleep 

there's no waking from, men and women

reduce to rising numbers on television.

We were never taught to count so far.

 

IV

India's spine crushes under the burden

of screams. The newspapers must be full 

of obituaries but they aren't. The trees laugh.

The dead are nameless. The government

is busy filing cases against the aggrieved.

The greatest indication of irresponsibility 

is blame. We get high on camphor, the sky 

falls. We exit the world through a wound.

Is there no god in the heart of a monster? 

He is tearing us apart, and making slow work 

of it. Dear destruction, we dread your old song.

V

When people suffer, they want to scream.

All we hear is an expression of suffering,

not the anguish itself. Time is a window

we cannot pass through. Have you ever

watched someone suffocate slowly?

We are drifted ashore, stripped of all but

our grief which too needs oxygen to survive.

There are no words, all we can do is look

silently at the dead. Sometimes the song

just sings itself apart. The birds disappear.

Future is nothing but a hole in the ground.

Author's Note: A friend's father died today, and another friend's grandfather. Many others have lost many others. India is suffering with an almost-apocalyptic second-wave, which comes directly as a result of failure of the Modi-government to prepare for it. This poem emerged from the angst which is a big, initial part of grief.

Karan Kapoor is the author of a novelette Maya and the co-author of a novel The Dreaming Reality, both independently published. Long-listed for Toto funds the Arts awards, his poems have appeared in The Indian Quarterly, G5A Imprint, Stride, and the Mountain Ink. He's currently working on his debut poetry collection. When not reading or writing, he is obsessing over classical music. Currently in his final semester of MA in Literary Art Creative Writing, he wants to continue to live a life devoted to music and literature.

TELL ME THE AMERICA WE WANTED NEVER EXISTED

by Dwain Wilder

Tell me about Jim Crow and I will read you chapters from "Huckleberry Finn."

Tell me about slavery and I will tell you about Harriet Tubman, John Fairfield, Levi Coffin and a host of hidden hands, and the Underground Railroad.

Tell me about overweening power and I will tell you about the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention, and Frederick Douglas.

Tell me about the worst of racism and I will tell you about a white man, John Brown, losing his life to spark a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry.

Tell me about oppression and I will ring the rafters with Wendell Phillips,
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!
—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…"

Tell me the America we always wanted has never existed,
that people the world over, desperate for refuge
and yearning for it here
are but glamoured and I will show you a gift.

I will show you a present from another people’s dream of liberty,
a lady standing at a harbor raising a torch,
Holding a tablet inscribed with the day we called ourselves free;
at her feet, a few lines from a poem

and point out to you an endless procession of people who rely on her,
the gift of her,
rely on the torch,
rely on the tablet’s date, rely
on the fragment of the poem
and weep bitter gladness at first sight of the harbor.

The public anguish as our President and his henchmen
treat destitute people and their children like criminals,
little more than so much dirt,
for seeking asylum at our borders
—the existence of the America the humble of the world need
is proven by that anguish, its mass, its inevitability.

Your anguish. All it takes is yours. All of it.

Dwain Wilder is a Buddhist activist, editor of The Banner, an online weekly newsletter for grass roots activists working to get our country to acknowledge and respond to the current climate emergency. Dwain has taught meditation at Attica Prison, New York. He is a member of the Rochester poetry community, and builds stringed musical instruments for a living. He lives with his wife, their dog and cat, and a large rowdy macaw, in a quaint cottage beside a large dark forest.