To announce a new season,
a Golapkhash tree falls over powerlines
as a corpse drops over a bed
that burns with the rest of him.
*
What was I before that summer
when hot rays rifled in the air
if not a choo-train’s fixed rhyme scheme
through a long field of sugarcane
that the hulky May sun
had not yet punched and cracked.
*
Each hand-fanned evening, my father dozes off,
trying his best to peel his eyes for my mother
tallying the meagre digits of the afternoon
yet something burns in our suburban kitchen,
from our neighbour’s Hindu prayer room,
from the bell-tongued town hall—
a strong stench of blood & gunpowder
caustic, metallic, entirely hypnotic.
*
A field set on fire is a room slowly brightening.
No mouse, no bowerbird to applaud
the great concerto of the blaze.
All night, the tall and flaccid flames
withdraw into fear.
*
On this field, my name becomes a small accordion
upon K’s pierced tongue. Each string, a consonant strung
from a different corner of her mouth. How it travels, unravels
from her roof to mine, the rain’s meek pa dha ni sa.
*
To uproot a colony of ants, feed them
sugar laced with borax, feed them
vinegar & limewater, feed them
diatomaceous earth, feed them
the burning end of lighter fluid.
*
A man with eleven fingers holds my father
by the collar, asks him to return to Bangladesh.
In this frame, I am curious about what’s tucked
in his belt that the tee makes a sorry effort to hide
what makes my father stammer in the sunlit field, voice & voice
swelling up in my parents’ tiny bedroom, the bodies squelching
in the river, raising the town’s temperature— their pale borders
wrinkled like overripe grapes, ruptured by sweet water.
*
Gunshots chord the field. The river refuses outright
to gulp evidence down. My father coughs up phlegm
scarlet as shore water. In the bathroom, I prick myself
to comprehend his pain. Some wounds fester even before
the skin learns its lesson. By the hush of dawn, K skips town
with only a note: I will be back. For days, I taste the briny blood
coppered on her lips. For weeks, nothing fights the blowtorch heat.
*
My mother utters a prayer for the gone, for the ones
yet to go, the birds that witness the rotting of flesh.
We’ll go where they’ll never find us, her lips tremble
as beads of sweat line my father’s forehead. He admits
it’s just humid weather. All that can break
the crushing stillness of our breathless kitchen
is what crashes in through the window:
hiss-smoke, heatstroke.
*
A room set on fire is a field, darkening. A family
whose sinews are threatened with canines
jumps willingly into the blast furnace of the night,
burns
like black ice: a whispered rumour, a ghost.
*
On this field, K’s mother grows pallid as an owl, wrapped
in a bloated body bag, one of too many— the radios screeching
Mayday, Mayday, the police armed to their gunmetal teeth,
my family, the hapless field mice— scurrying, scurrying.
*
*
The field is sung with horseradish & many sunflowers.
The field is a memory of the field that was: patches bald
without bloom. No vulture, no past tense. I walk the field’s
forgetful recesses, inhaling its vanished smoke, an entire decade
outgrown like a swimsuit. I utter the names that don’t answer back.
Sunflowers nod in their stead, bending whichever way the sun asks.
Debmalya Bandyopadhyay is a POC poet and PhD student currently residing in the United Kingdom.