What are the consequences of silence?

Bhanu Kapil

53.

Red Canna, I see you. Edge of. What I saw: a flower blossoming, in slow motion. 
Not specific enough. Okay. No. Cannot. Red Canna, I veer into you. I am not in 
one straight line. Red Canna, I see you. 1904. The University of Arizona Museum 
of Art. Opening in slow motion: are you okay? Are you okay? Can you hear me? 
(I can't)

That's how it begins: impenetrable.

The book of two words I happen to see, out of the corner of my eye, on a wall. Such 
slowness.

These words took years to arrive.

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

of sealant. Organs bleating

On the forest floor.

A first step.

Bhanu Kapil

2023

Collude

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.

Bhanu Kapil

2019

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

Poems

What are the consequences of silence?

More by this poet

Pilgrimage

Collude

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

Poems

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What are the consequences of silence?

More by this poet

Pilgrimage

Collude

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

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