Digital Poetics 3.26 Identification by Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay

At an inn I am asked for identification
traveler let that be my name
the first winter rain
--Basho

Say it when you call me to the back of the room. I search for you in the canyon. Consider: identification dictate document devil. Consider: diaspora visa downtown distance. Say I am with her not she is with me no longer. Say I have forgotten how it sounds in my mouth. Consider: to meet someone who has only seen it on the page. A hidden home, detained. How did you meet someone from Kolkata asks the border? Say to meet is to name. Locked away where you cannot reach it. She introduces me as someone else. I become her, the patrol. After all, consider: the traveler or the agent, each a different checkpoint or trial. I search for it in the side mirror.

Roll up the window
with my bare hands again
Say my name

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Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters' candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Connecticut River Review, among others.

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