Two poems
by Sophia Pandeya
Flood
You are a dehshut gard kicking up dust
storms determined to blind all eyes to love
I am an ever present tense
a poem with eyes in every pore and crevice
eyes that carve a bodhisattva in every stone you smash
tonight, hypocrite mullah, heavenly drug dealer, the eyes in my poem are wolves
hounding you, your bastard masters, the deep dominions of nation-states & ugly hatreds
tonight the eyes of the poem inhabit the voices you incite to murder from the podium, from the pulpit, from the twit feed and the recruiting chat room
the eyes of the poem embrace those whom you murdered
by machete at the tenderest nape
where poets soft as flowing rivers like being kissed
where you poured a sulphuric acid dissolving her
there the eyes of the poem kiss her beautiful rebellious hips eyes breasts pubis
where by suicide bombing in greed of a fictional paradise you ripped
the lips of love’s shrine to shreds
there the eyes of the poem stitch each lost love to a song that passes from lip to lip
where,
by calculated stoning, mind the size of the stones, because prolonged suffering is so important
by five point blank bullets from a motorcycle stopped alongside her car
by being burned alive while pregnant in an industrial kiln
by crude photo shop to slut shame her brilliance
by the brain washed swallow of hook, line and sinker
by the “non-state actor”
by the complicit silence of the bystander
by the weakest seams
you kill, maim, torture, hack,troll, censor
the Promethean eyes of the poem are witness
emblem of both fire and water
a force you cannot murder
these chashm-deed eyes like lava in water
will always find a way in
between the padlocks you are trying to put on brains
you better watch out, watch out for that flood of fire
no mythical ark can save you now
In the Margins
At the barbershop, vintage model airplanes
made out of beer cans hang from the ceiling, suspended
in time, I recognize a Tiger Moth, circa World War 2
the same plane my mist blinded father crashed
in 1969, nose down in the fragrant tea
gardens outside Sylhet, slipping three discs
on his lower back, the pain
would come, when least expected, keeping
memory fresh, it was I
who would bend to pick up his dropped papers, thread
his rambling thoughts, scribble my own
silently all the while
in the margins
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Sophia Pandeya is an in-between, an inhabitant of hyphen. A South Asian-American poet whose ancestry lies in Allahabad-Bhopal, she was born on the “other” side of an artificial border trumped up from identity politics and the entrails of empire. Her poetry has been published in the print anthologies, Cactus Heart, Askew Poetry, Bank Heavy Press and Spilled Ink as well in a number of online journals including Poetry International, The Adirondack Review, The Daily O, Lantern Journal, Convergence Journal and Full Of Crow. Links to published work can be found at her site trancelucence.net. She blogs at rootsandwings