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Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

And then they ask for a heaven? You had said I should be with him instead. I have had two bodies from birth. Dividing up a person or animal or territory. There is nothing romantic about a corpse flower plucked from an endangered home and growing in an American backyard.

6/28 3:24pm: been spending a lot of time sleeping

Movement people, white wealth hoarders, separated by a sea and a continent on all sides, lose like a body part right? decapitation, but more forgiving, white heaven like McMansion suburb with a church, and a rampage past death, a knight who loses all his limbs.

6/30 2:25pm: inside of van: many broken pots from the times we hit a curb, soil on the hardwood, cabinets I stained, lots of pillows. “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape!”

I’ve never seen my whole self, and they want oblivion, and a transitory purgatory, or a person in parts. I find myself on his floor, bare room and cold. I do not find it strange. Lately my body feels more and more like a box. more relevantly by time and the past, compartmentalizing, throwing things at the emptiness, or staying awake.

7/1 2:03pm: border towns

Do they make the cut, or are they too inconvenient? What about rain? and never will, dismembering or in many different lights, Something huge and without music has just happened. You taught me to seek the hot wall behind me, and he is just too liquid, already on the way out. I stop to ask or stop asking.

2:33 pm: shaving my head on sidewalks

I do not find it strange, instead I just read some article about the poor image or the new biography, like this whole planet is balanced at 23.5 degrees of axial tilt by the moon. And you are saying life isn’t enough. And you are asking me what I am doing even if you are falling asleep (down here!)

7/2 1:23pm: fake traffic


Photo by Jasmine Waheed on Unsplash

Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay

Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters' candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Cream City Review, among others.