I am perhaps in awe
of your feathered-cap majesty,
you hypocrite princess,
our transplanted Karenina
of a Kremlin motorway.
What good or what rot,
in being a century short or tall,
when I cannot put thumb and finger
on your oily roots …
I see such strange wounds
in your sideways gaze.
You are inverted, translucent
before my searching eyes.
Around us, in evening’s light, gleam
far fewer fields.
Only god-abandoned husks,
left scorched, empty, as configurations
of any good atheist’s faintly-familiar famine.
Everything given and, so, everything taken.
With your hair neither
wet nor parted,
and I,
neither living nor dead.
Aniket Sanyal’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, D.F.L. Lit, Terror House Magazine, Expat Press, and Daily Science Fiction among other places. Aniket was born in India, lives in New Jersey, and is a graduate of Rutgers University. He can be found on Twitter @AniketSanyal6.