Radical Futurity

Blue ash of skin between the rubble, a child’s body buried beneath concrete, these images are stitched beneath my eyelids, stuck.

Don’t they warn you against the misfortune / of unveiling desiccated bones to your green / sky?

And after / one hundred twenty days, we / pinched at her stems.

you’re burning what does it taste / like when god makes mistakes

The snake bites its tail in a desperate attempt to live, does so, and dies. / But it lives again and again, the story told over and over.

The sinking feeling trailed me as I worked my way around the room: There’d been a precious opening, and I’d wasted it.

In my writing, my father is ‘Dad,’ because I need this less intimate address as a buffer from what I have lost, left behind, or perhaps never even had.

In this implantation there is thick blood / so red it sings to black, so viscous it could be shaped / in the hands like clay.

It’s two in the morning, and I remember what my grandmother warned me about again and again: “It’s the hour of ‘ushimitsu doki.’”

how can I love like this, / eating the bones of the sun, / its corpse of light, its flammable horizons—

What if, when you ran your fingers along the embroidery, you could hear the voices of your ancestors? 

Weather lights a mouth as vines drink sun in windowed rooms, / but I lied before.

“Tinkering a Way, Together: An Interview with Plastivap Inventor Mirukosee Balan”

Until the fodder of the fraught mind becomes the burnable legs of a useless table, / fuel only for compassion.