A Poem by Anindita Sengupta

Becoming Animal

The heart is a vale of snags, wood debris,
nests bursting with spruce beetle. Desire
remains Pangong Tso, a lake so high,

I need permits to visit, the chafe
of lungs in rarefied air.        This is the xenia
of wind—it pounds at the window, the window

gives in to it. This is the larking of ferns:
to shoot up without looking. When the heater goes on,
I decompose memory like bacteria. In the dark,

a prowling I know by sound. I have listened for it
my whole life. The susurrus does not
hunt outside—there is no molecular secret to this. Only the circling

of an image as if a wounded deer. For years
I wondered what to do with these hands.
They are at peace only when aflutter. 

Coyotes yip-howl to lead and mark, and just two
can sound like an entire pack.
Their cry travels from mouth to mouth,

reverberating across brushfires and deserts,
rising and falling until no one remembers
where it started or why.

Anindita Sengupta is the author of Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall, 2016) and City of Water (Sahitya Akademi, 2010). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in several anthologies and in journals such as Salamander, Folio, Feral, Plume, perhappened and others. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Her website is http://aninditasengupta.com.