Digital Poetics 3.24 Two Poems by Priyanka Voruganti
Photo by Paul Blenkhorn on Unsplash
Doomsday
Two times this year it had been her. Shift-
shattered all the known embers
on Earth. She had plucked each individual
rosary bead from its stem, placed them
in acetone for renewal. It was terribly
exhausting work, the upkeep of it all.
She was the person who donned
high priestess gear and went cajoling
on Hollywood Boulevard. In the grainy
late-night ads, the ones paid for
by small or dying companies, the ones
with lawyers advertising hair gel
and orange veneer, there were prayers
said. She knew the mysticism
of the every-day, traced the Latin
in seagull screams. Now, a quietude
settled upon the city, and no one
seemed to be interested in the pamphlets
she had to offer. When nothing
was happening was when something
was wrong. The physics of it all
seamlessly organized within the arena
of her brain during the pitch black
night, when medieval orders could be
elucidated through the paint thinning
of the walls, or astronomical
end-dates were deduced within
the shuteye of her leaky faucet. She
liked when things finally made sense,
in this way. When outside was scary,
unknowable, nonsensical, and doused
with a kind of realism so precise,
cartoon-ish, even: that was when dark
became safe. It was in the dark
where she could coax chaos, something
knowable, the shadows on the ceiling
undulating with such familiarity, utterly
rational, and completely hers. It was here
that she embraced and knew who she was,
knew that she was destined, chosen, even,
for something very important.
Living in Parenthesis
angelic breakdowns from two-story
terraces: the break and fury of something
half-born, something half-felt, an entire
colossal being splayed out on your
backyard. who’s to say that we’re
not living in parentheses, that this
fallen saint isn’t actually doused
in universe-dust and early organism.
the tube man outside the car dealership
is air-dancing, buoyant, free—the inflatable
organs inside his papery skin jittery
and alive, properly moving to whatever
pop ballad is blaring from the car radio.
we took a tally of what fell from the sky
today: some nuts and bolts, candy wrappers,
snake skin, and this. next to your bike
by the pavement, sprinkler whirring
wet onto its silky skin—a centaur,
a monops, no, an Unclassified One,
guts and intestinal fluid seeping toward
your front porch. today we witnessed
something so dead it has become other.
what if we enshrined it in plaster, posted
it up next to the living room fireplace
like a stuffed deer head, but greater?
or maybe we could sew it back together,
return it to glory, and then perhaps
station it next to the American flag
at your mailbox, fill its body with air
through a vacuum that we seal to its belly,
and let it fly once again, like a tube man,
our very own personal saint, one that ebbs
and flows to our whims and adheres
to our personal music choices, one
that dances with ferocity, its skin
slipping off with each sway, telling
everyone on the block, everyone
in the world, that we’ve found
the answers to all our questions.
*
Priyanka Voruganti is a NYC-based poet studying anthropology at the University of Cambridge. They have been published in Speciwomen Magazine, Fatberg, The Brooklyn Rail, and more.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
