The blood splashed on the street slashes the
heart beastly
under the skin
pogrom is the new religion
why should someone think antediluvian
to translate it?
Forgetting the street names of republic,
democracy, and freedom
hate is the season that doesn't depart anymore
what's the dialysis of your family name?
They allege that I worship a god anticlockwise
is that the right-handed malevolence?
Fate is an embroidery of the fiber that
runs its fingers across someone's pain
and god’s buttocks in the full moon
they deport love, roses and nostalgias.
Those folks are asking their ribs
those folks are not able to answer their hearts
some are devastatingly not able to tress their
missing wives, sons and daughters.
And the other folks are condemning
a dagger's cruelty
violence is the standard etiquette in the land
we live in an acidic belly of hate.
Pitambar Naik reads/edits Mud Season Review and Minute Magazine. His work appears or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Packingtown Review, The Other Side of Hope, Rigorous, Spectra Poets, Ghost City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, New Contrast, The Indian Quarterly, and elsewhere. He's the author of The Anatomy of Solitude (Hawakal), a book of poetry. He grew up in Odisha and lives in Hyderabad, India.
