The Poetry Section: Anita Mohan

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

This week, two new poems from Anita Mohan.

suicide by homeopathy

we say homoios: or kind of kind
and patheia, meaning effect,
branched down from pathos.
a kind of sadness cured by a concoction
of sea shells-their white curves dip
into shade like a clavicle.
or the wet stir of bee pollen gathered
from a sun-quenched apiary
or indigo threshed from inky fields.
so, what would it mean, to extinguish existence
by inhaling odds and ends that exhale black ocean
on the breath, black dirt after a downpour,
that fresh sea garden gone bitter on the tongue?
or what would it mean to discover medicinal trails
of fungus in a parasitic Iceman?

what this dark vast pathos doesn’t intimate
is that he lies buried like treasure in Alpine Sugar
a kind of sleeping beauty.
one spring, the veins of the Iceman defrost,
run salty. his cells unhinge from their moorings
in that black ocean, by the sudden chemistry
of what’s in the blood.

no, everything is not going to be okay

tonight, our two paper starlings play on a stage
of paper, under a black type of rain,
their dialogue all strange incantation.
someone should warn them, don’t bind yourself
to a typewritten theater, because the effect
of scissor-cut speech is not akin
to a thunderous flap of wings knifing air.
to be okay, dart your beaks like quills ‘round kumquats,
warm as the curl of infants’ hands.
for if you starlings insist on making love-chatter
from pulp, your moon-drenched mouths
will run over with type, and know: everything
is not going to be okay.

Anita Mohan is a poet, fiction writer and litigator in the SF Bay Area. Her first book of poems is Letters to an Albatross, recently published by BlazeVOX books. She was the recipient of a Puffin Foundation, Ltd. grant in 2005.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at [email protected].

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