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Collude

Bhanu Kapil

with the anemone zero.

Drink 12 oz. of coffee in Longmont.

Are you parched?

Is your name Pinky?

What color is the skin of your inner arm, creamy?

Valentine City rebate: a box of chocolates from Safeway.

Yours, yours, yours.

In its entirety.

Don't collude with your inability to give or receive love.

Collude, instead, with the lining of the universe.

Descent, rotation, silk water, brief periods of intense sunlight

striated with rose pink glitter.

The glitter can only get us.

So far.

Here we are at the part with the asphalt, airstream Tupperware,

veins, some nice light stretching.

Call me.

This is a poem for a beloved.

Who never arrived.

Bhanu Kapil’s collections include How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize; Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015); humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009); Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006); and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001).

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“I wrote fragments of this poem into my blog The Vortex of Formidable Sparkles on a freezing cold day after I'd taught nine and half hours straight. It came out of the strange, deep loneliness I sometimes feel in the U.S., and the desire to start living a life in which I no longer colluded with modes of despair and regret. I came to this country to write something I could not write in another place. Perhaps it's time to begin. Also, the last line is a rewriting or re-imagining of a Mira Bai bhajan, a lament that my mother sang to me often when I was a young child.”

—Bhanu Kapil

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More by this poet

Pilgrimage

The arch of my foot aches.

Soon, we’re walking through nettles, a yellow paddock,

fresh ginger packed between the gum

And tooth.

In excess, sugars become fat, a kind

Bhanu Kapil

2023

Humanimal [I want to make a dark mirror out of writing]

47. I want to make a dark mirror out of writing: one child facing the other, like Dora and little Hans. I want to write, for example, about the violence done to my father’s body as a child. In this re-telling, India is blue, green, black and yellow like the actual, reflective surface of a mercury globe. I pour the mercury into a shallow box to see it: my father’s right leg, linear and hard as the bone it contains, and silver. There are scooped out places where the flesh is missing, shiny, as they would be regardless of race. A scar is memory.

Bhanu Kapil

2008

Humanimal [Feral children are fatty]

4. Feral children are fatty, complex and rigid. When you captured the two children, you had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter. Descent and serration. No. I don't want to ask primal questions.

Bhanu Kapil

2008

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Collude

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