by Serena Devi
It's been seasons and
seasons of archetypal
bitching
about the roads and
the bugs and the toilets, "feel[ing]
like a drowned rat in the heat,
the humidity."
But you can hardly blame her,
a woman who comes from a land
without pain.
Again she has vaulted herself
to a faraway place
to itemize a man
who is a man in a way
she has never felt before.
Desire is usually punishing.
It takes a real yankee to speak of
these things
in terms of fairness.
Are mosquitos fair?
She lives, proof that getting
what you want atrophies the mind.
It’s even worse when there are signs,
shared names or rare birds or stars
spackling the profane tapestry.
He is crawling toward a great devouring
core. A pragmatist, spectacle
seizes him.
Of course, he is a motherfucker in the
worst way a man can be,
though she wills otherwise.
When she speaks to the sky
here, it speaks back in a different voice.
There is always an alternative arrangement,
the mother-in-law wields her cane like a scythe.
Americans as a rule
ought to keep their mouths
shut.
But no, she opens up
sinkhole-wide
tearing off the mic, retreating
into a foreign terminal
where even the bathroom signs
are unreadable.
Still, her friends would describe
her as a hopeless romantic.
Why else would the
cameras have been there?
He will keep smoking and losing
money at the fights,
and she will spend the rest of
her life asking the moon.
****
Serena Devi is a writer from Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Social Text, and more. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.