LOG OUT
—Rhony Bhopla, Sacramento
The man at the entrance
of Gandhi’s tomb
swore at me for loving.
He hissed with his shaft tongue:
“If you log in, you had better log out.”
He spat into my ancestral heart.
The paan juice dribbled down my
breasts, empty sacs filling with
his inspired gaseous poison.
The messages of the world are
paramount—women wailing after
kidnapped children,
crafty photographs
of
wide-eyed unknowns.
We have worlds within worlds.
Whose world am I in?
Everyone is waiting in line for something.
Log out.
On a bitch trip. Sailing, flying, speeding
through storms that heave
on the other side of the universe.
I don’t know who you are, crying baby.
Switch.
The rapists.
Switch.
I’m watching a lady now, she is
telling someone that the broken glass is everywhere.
A gauge hyper-extends,
my sword made up
of revolving pendulistic breasts
slicing through
a looter’s rage, as I spin.
I throw fantastic amounts of money in the face of
this woman. Someone is dead again.
There it is.
—the ripped carcass of one’s dream.
He said it once, about the dream.
Log out.
I walk onto the “crunch, crunch” of glass
on the convenience store floor, and knock on
the tomb of Bapu.
Three bullets shot my breath
—I speak through all mayhem. He responds.
“Clean it like a cat vulva, after a litter. The infection must not spread.”
Log out.
I wrap the small dead man with my unraveled turban cloth.
The teachings cannot be silenced.
One two three. Lift.
His blood trickles down my arms,
staining my death as if to resuscitate
me.
He speaks to me as I raise him high.
I place him into the thinnest verticle line
through a miniscule cavity in the top of my skull.
Bapu Ji, you stay in my blood
like the smell
of ancient memory.
_________________________
—Medusa
Bapu: father, well-known reference to Mahatma Gandhi
Ji: Term of respect
paan: betal quids