Sonali Pattnaiknobody wants to hear
about the things we really want to say
or the things we should be saying.
like every time I step out
to go somewhere alone
I can think of nothing more
than my father once upon a living man here
or how we are living and breathing flowers
while babies are choking on poisonous
gas somewhere, or being raped a month old
and we say
‘everything will be fine’
‘let’s meet up soon’
‘coffee is overdue’
stay anodyne
sometimes we go even further
and murmur
peace is overrated and you know
that country deserves to be exterminated
we chew on our almond biscotti
as though they were the bones
of the babies who deserve to be
will be, are being, crushed
in justified extermination
and there’s always a menu card
choc-a-bloc with choices in her hands
and he feels the tickle of his new car keys
in his pants as he walks
and we each have a gift
at the ‘all you can eat’
and walk away
from the howl of hurt
at the edge of our yolks
and we fork at greed and hope leaks
nobody wants to say to each other
what they truly mean or who they truly are
saying is rarely confession, as they say
these days it’s a kind of cover we wear
so we have created a shared vocab
of (un)easy pleasures and wants
and our tears we have pushed down a little further
from our throats into our guts
turning bleeding salt into curable cancers
into the deep bags of pharma companies
into bottled oxygen, masks and gloved hands
for we are opposed to crying
mourning and dying
we will not say to one another
what we fear or let anyone hear
us bleeding into our beds
so we stifle our roars and bury
our clawed feet sometimes
into poetry
sometimes, print is the first act of denial
but not so with poetry perhaps
it has its teeth in beauty and truth
at least we have poetry
so at it can sit
amidst us at the dinner table
born, bottled and in its own liquid terrain
its eyes bulbous
watching us back
like a fetus in a jar
