Poem for the Animals
For all the animals to be vigilant, we will lap design into concrete foods. We will find a place for forum for pregnant vagrants since after all—all that’s weak in our hearts may be and if we are still not sufficient at the moment of our mouth’s openings, then we’ll move our births into another order.
After a conceded amount of time we say slumber. Then another hour, another song stuck in my head, and the smell of our morning meal left in the slow cooker to simmer. I wake betweens sounds of bubbling water, dog snores, and you talking in your sleep about how the room feels like quenched heat, like a beach in July.
You said it was a kind of playful hypnotism that would allow you to walk in your sleep to the kitchen, open the refrigerator door and make a sandwich. There could be nearly nothing in there or only a glowing upon the pull. But lack has it like luck and you can always manage to feed yourself somehow.
A ridge keeps growing upon your stomach, a hollowed out atmosphere. Like the peritoneum’s made out of metal, like a vagabond dog on the street—what could come caustic to the breaking and the skin? If you stand in one place long enough, you eventually wake up and with un-chewed food in your mouth.
*
But say the night is wine dark and we sleep through it. By morning that one cat’s meow will make a rhythm like blood pumps. Then all day our pupils will shrink to dots and after a few hours of blink blinks and stare, we can say the yellow light is so bright and drink.
The animals have split mouths and some can hold an arrow. We will gather contrivances to carry food on their backs and to extract the different kinds of foreign objects that cause pain in different parts of our bodies.
Or, if we sleep standing up the animals will build us a bed to serve us light by way of the stars. It could be that waking hours are like songs with no words, and then the moments in which we blink become pauses set to a sonata trill.
The animals are gathering now. Our stand and sleep came to: litter and herd, flight, pack and clattering, and after all that song. I can keep naming each for you and you know now how they are all here and sleeping at our feet.
—Soham Patel
bhanu feeds soham a concession
we say reverse the book in duration. we say slumber
Mate with surfaces. A ridge keeps growing your stomach metal,
I want to have sex with what I want to become. But say the night is wine dark
sleep through it. The animals are gathering now. Then I can say to visitors: what comes next for a red girl? litter and herd, visible through the walls of a house
flight, “No point in writing home.”
pack and clattering, Then what? and after all that song.
bhanu feeds soham a concession: a monster response arranged by Ching-In Chen from Soham Patel's poem and Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006).
