Beyond sanitation, I look at the tendencies
of being alone
It has a claim
over small, household things
Dogs barking in the park, babies laugh
I know
There is a red swing
with nobody on it
Now there is no origin
It is calm here in my room
Broken lines on the wall
A dead scream in the glass
An old spot
on my quarantine shirt collar
I sense loss
Dead Letter Boxes
At night, I roam in the bedroom
and in the balcony
and in the living room and in the kitchen
and again come back to the bedroom,
living room, balcony and the kitchen
like an apprentice postman
I see blocked houses
in the next closed alley; red letter boxes
hanging on every tree
How many addresses do we invent?
Destination is now almost dead
I breathe deep
thinking of a postman lost in the woods
complaining about the butterflies
and the dead letter boxes in June
Nothing anymore feels the same
I feel
Therefore I am
standing alone in the darkness
looking for an address
Sickness
Now I have three time-zones in three rooms
Kitchen is the new League of Nations
Here I am in my tree-facing room — a dot on a map
like an island
A succulent in a blue tub — no visitors — same nightmares —
seven old drafts of longitude and latitude
on my table beside two books of Wallace Stevens and yellow air
I don’t listen to music at present
It distracts
from my immediate concerns like — sleep and remoteness
I have a hospital in my breath
and I talk to an old mug with three scratches
and to a horse chestnut with a broken arm
This is normal
when you have lost faith in Descartes
I watch the cirrocumulus clouds stuck on my window net
Peeled plastic paint — a strip of vitamin C — my floral bedspread
On weekends, I wash all my masks (mostly black and white):
each for a day, even for my staggered sleep
and clip them carefully on a clothesline in the balcony, as if,
they are my dead faces for the week
Sekhar Banerjee is a Pushcart Award nominated poet. The Fern-gatherers’ Association (2021) is his latest collection of poems. He has been published in Stand Magazine, Indian Literature, The Bitter Oleander, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Better Than Starbucks, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Tiger Moth Review and elsewhere. His poems have been included in Indian and international poetry anthologies. He has recently co-edited The Brown Critique ‘Home’ anthology. He lives in Kolkata.
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Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
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