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Non Sonnet: Lopamudra Basu

Lopamudra Basu is a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout. She grew up in Calcutta, India. Her most recent scholarly publication is Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation and Its Others After 9/11: Homeland Insecurity (December, 2018). Her poetry has been published in Postcolonial Text, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Barstow and Grand, The Hitchlit Review and the Poetry Calendar of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She lives in Eau Claire, WI. This poem is dedicated to Sanchita Hati.

 

There are no sonnets when the biopsy is positive

when you call me with the news that for six months

the poisons will drip through your veins to vapourise

the multi- focal obscenity that has lodged itself in your body

like a thief or colonizer unknown and unsuspected,

feeding on your blood like a parasite.

There are no words to give, no lying comfort

to numb your pain of shorn hair, cut chest, taste of tin on tongue,

that my mushrooms with pasta won’t placate.

Yet, I remain to share this silence, to hold your hand,

to text you in the middle of the infusion about my mundane

day, cooking, teaching, writing words lacking sense

 restless for winter to melt, for the leaves to bud

like the nails on your toes— baby steps to our old life.

 

 

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