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issue 2: ROAD TRIP

furred cows in the
san bernardino mountains

ANINDITA SENGUPTA
In the dry lake
they stood like boulders,

clumps of fur over
their eyes, the lake a field,

pistachio and carob,
land where water should

have been, a forgetting of
water cows the color of old rust

on iron, pelage sumptuous.
I thought of a cloud

of bones broken,
rising in air, like rain moving upwards,

bone-white sky, men killed
for what they eat, for meat

they need, for surviving,
breath weight wait

India, in three years, we
killed 44 men, wounded more than

a hundred,
for the sake of cows. Ruminate

that. Satna, Tuticorin, cities
of cement and religion.

How much god
does one need to inhale

before becoming beast?
Bodies map our land in ones

and twos, beaten, scarred.
They mark this parched lake,

a blood motif lumbering
across our aching lands.
The numbers of the killed were true when the poem was written. They may have risen since. Many others may be unreported.

Anindita Sengupta is the author of City of Water (Sahitya Akademi) and Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall.in). Her work has appeared in several anthologies and in Plume, One, High Desert Journal, Asian Cha, The Indian Quarterly among others. She is from Mumbai, India, and currently lives in Los Angeles.
perhappened mag
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