Your five windows

are opaque, smeared

 

with dust. The land

the house stands on

 

sinks into hell. Even if

you open your panes

 

the breeze carries

the corpse-stench inside.

 

 

 

—————————————-A honeybee

 

———————————————=beats about

————————————–=-the heart’s chambers.

 

∞

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His hybrid memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021, Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir), received the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.