Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

Bug Apocalypse

I want the bugs back. Yes, I hate them. Still,
I want my car’s grille midge-smudged like my dad’s was
back in the 80s. Cookouts, gnats, and Springsteen,
natural mischief, little wings that brushed me
as if a little girl just blew against
my neck and ran away. The fireflies
would light up, float up, ghostly, all together,
and something sunken surfaced through the summer
and we were there for it. I want the bugs back
because I want to slap my neck and marvel
at my own blood almost smuggled out of me.
I’ve seen the truck that fumigates my suburb
and yes, I hate mosquitoes too, but hell,
I’ll put up with an itch to pack the sky
again, to call the sparrows back, the swallows,
and give them air that’s heme-sweet to swoop through.
I want the earth to want to touch me. These days,
I walk through uncut grass with naked ankles
and nothing takes a nibble. Lemonade
left on the back deck drowns in its own ice—
no flies. I swear there used to be more earthworms
gasping on sidewalks after rain. I used
to airlift them with grass blades, baseball cards
that weren’t worth much, or my dirty fingers.
Their cooking bodies, startled, writhed and spiraled
a spell, barely alive, alive enough
to glance around and recoil at my touch.

At the Optometrist

I miss my uncorrected vision. Things
were guitar strings:

An absent hand had given them a strum.
The blurs would hum,

implicit chords I had to see to hear,
nothing but tears

between my worsening eyesight and the seen,
a natural sheen.

Each eye-test lens she swivelclicked in place
before my face

sharpened the time I told, that told on me,
A, G, and E

the unexpectedly serif-flecked letters
I blinked and read her.

A finger’s touch, and the tuning fork is stilled,
its shiver killed.

I do wear glasses now, but doff them often
to let things soften,

faces unwrinkling, restored to youth.
Restored to truth.

Culled

Love that’s a seizure, a spasm shared—
Aura, ictus.
Love that can poison a radius bare,
Like eucalyptus.

A cult for two, where we drug ourselves
For sacrifice.
Love with a spire, its midnight bells.
Two lives, two eyes,

No depth in the world if we aren’t a pair.
Hemlock pollen
Dusting for fingerprints on the air.
Love that’s a calling,

A wanderlust haunting us through the pines.
A wren’s egg, ruptured.
A tangible fog that has shaped us signs
Of coming rapture.

Amit Majmudar's most recent poetry collection is What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). A memoir, Twin A, is forthcoming in the United States from Slant Books, as well as a nonfiction collection, Black Avatar and Other Essays, from Acre Books, both in 2023. His latest novel is The Map and the Scissors (HarperCollins India, 2022). A forthcoming mythological retelling is The Mahabharata Trilogy (Penguin India, 2023). He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children.