i’ll be your vital clearing

Amrita Chakraborty

07/26/23

While walking back from the library, I pass a cream-colored house with a plastic lion in the front yard. The lion is very obviously fake— its face misshapen, color a dull brown, no artistic detailing at all— but it is the size of a large dog, & sits patiently at the left corner of the yard, half hidden by the bushes. Perhaps because of its size or its posture, despite the lion’s plasticity, I startle as I walk past it, my peripheral vision picking up this false predator & giving it life. As I turn to it and then away, smiling at my own mistake, I wonder if I actually mistook it for a dog, or some animal more likely to be sitting so authoritatively in the front yard of a house in queens. But the more I think on it, the less true this seems. No— for that second, for my brain & the jolt of surprise-terror-awe in my chest— the lion was as real as anything in that subdued landscape. It laid claim to my response, insinuating its own reality into mine. Misshapen & discolored & alive, it watched me walk away.

lash

a foreigner's question goes unheard. a foreigner's question goes unheard. a foreigner questions what goes unheard. a foreigner questions where it goes. a foreigner questions where the herd goes. a foreigner, unheard, walks from question to sentence to word. a foreigner's sentence is hard, on the ears, on the tongue. a foreigner's sentence is handed up then down, is lashed to the mast, is barely discerned. a foreigner's sentence isn't a given. a foreigner's sentence serves as sieve and casket. a foreigner's word is derivative. a foreigner's word is twin. a foreigner's word is grinning, emptied, tenderized, conditioned. a foreigner's word is the slate for your syllables. a foreigner turns to be the blank. a foreigner's turn to kill what listens. a foreigner's urge to be in bed and underwritten. a foreigner's word moves from mouth to throat to belly. a foreigner moves like everything that shouldn't. a foreigner's word is weather to the foreigner's stone. a foreigner's word is blinking into the morning sun. a foreigner, you think, must be honed. a foreigner's question goes unheard. a foreigner's sentence cannot stand. a foreigner's word, erased from record, enters the field of judgment. as penance, you earn forty lashes. a foreigner understands this as a foreigner should, and opens each eye onto your unforgiven skin.

june 9th, @nosebleedclub

Amrita Chakraborty, published in Voicemail Poems.

"veneer" by amrita chakraborty, published in indigo literary journal

https://tinyletter.com/goldenyellowgreen

hello!! i've just started a newsletter and plan on sending out my first post sometime this week. if you'd like occasional rambling emails from me delivered straight to your inbox, please feel free to subscribe <3