Kalyani Bindu

The dictator 

Believe them when they say, on some days, you were the morning,
and everyday another mud cocoon – an isolation unit – was placed
strategically, next to the gravel on their lips, these squeaky clean
worlds born in epileptic fits, ones that will expand into consanguineous
inseams and collapse at an angle, like a toppling moth.
 
If it is the skeletal charm of the regime – the angled sun blades
penetrating the vacant anthill – that you seek, let me tell you:
in the dark, it felt like red, gritty and warm blood mixing with
the moist lichen of a land that just would not come.
 
They refused to sanction the pecking order, and pour the laxative
into their lichen cups.
 
It felt like masquerading as a lizard in a vacuum chamber –
you asked, was not the sterility a grounding force, that freefalling
stillness in which fables bite their own tails, and birth themselves
into your mornings?
 
If only I could pull my putrefying neck inside, like it had a world to occupy.

Kalyani Bindu (she/her) is an Indian writer and researcher. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Kali Project (Indie Blu(e) anthology), Better than Starbucks, Half Empty Magazine, the Indian Express, Ethos Literary Journal, New Asian Writing, Guftugu, and others. She is a poetry editor at Variant Literature Journal. During her time as a columnist (The Occasional Owl) in White Crow Art Daily, she wrote articles revolving around socio-cultural themes.

Website: www.kalyani-bindu.com

Twitter: @bindu_kalyani