MAYDAY

LETTER FROM RAMABAI TO HER HUSBAND by Nitoo Das

Contributed By:

Beloved,
I’m tired
and this drying body
remembers the crane-
white of your nails tonight.

The widows come in
limp droves everyday
and my ears scorch
with their words.

Today, Shanta told me
“They gave me powders
to choke my daughter.”
Her hands kept
fluttering to her head
as if to touch
dream hair.

Sometimes
at night
I see my brother’s
ghost and we
still roam and
moan with bloated
bellies and tongues painted purple with
sour berries
and my hungry child-belly
carries Manorama
kicking and clawing inside me.

Beloved,
it rains outside and termites have grown
wings to search for frail lovers.
Soon they will
lose them and

tomorrow
I will see whispered wings
squashed to
the ground.

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Poetry

Further Reading

ANOTHER PIG-KNUCKLE-MOTHER POEM by John Repp

Mountain down to damp emerald moss, wind-bent hemlock, fragrant duff under tent floor, fog the metronomic gusts fail to dissolve, we break out supper—mine lost to memory, Ted’s pickled herring he gulps like a seal, the reek & smacking & cross-eyed, lip-licking contemplation settling me down at the formica table cleared of supper, dishes on […]

#FEED
by Heather Sweeney

Can honesty go viral? The truth is that my casket Is a hot dog bun & the mirror Is reversed the truth is that someone Is haunting me from the future & I woke up with a cold sore Caked with glitter I woke up wedged In a garage full of lazy boys & lit […]

The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli translated from the Italian by John Taylor,
reviewed by Caroline Maldonado

Italian poet Franca Mancinelli has internalized the landscape she grew up in poetically to express some of her deepest emotions. Beginning from the tremors, earthquakes and mudslides of her life and landscape, the poet develops her riveting ars poetica. “I have often felt that I carry writing in my body,” she writes, “that I have been inscribed in the darkness. (…) We are the imprint of the time that has been, of the life that has passed through us. By writing we bring to light these signs that we contain, as they are, obscure and indecipherable to us. It is like leaning over a threshold that looks into the void. We are between the unknown and nothingness.”