Dawn of new(?) air

Do you need water? I have water! 
He opens his chest to a row of searing bullets, 
he dies like a raven…we wield fists in their memory,
voices escape blood canals. We bundle
like fleets of flies in the woods of a distant free world 
where vigils are carried on the shoulders of our heads, 
and shoulders of their bodies, pealing in our ears 
like a scene from the cinema–a scene from an abattoir. 
A scene where houses are torched to the ground 
because there used to be an altar there, 
where someone once sank to their knees asking after a god, 
a prayer plant in each corner 
where the sun looped in a dozen pleats. 
For two days I don't eat a morsel, 
and my skin collapses by the bones, 
I start losing my face—I look as cold as a corpse, 
as this city solvates in silence and hoots, 
sometimes on the streets and sometimes at our doors.
Teetering in between the time I spent on the comfort 
of my bed the last few days, trying to heal reading
Didion's narratives, shedding a tear every time she says 'father', 
a gaping lacuna of promises sails by,
the last few days are all I keep. 
I remember that there is a Hindu family by our windows
whose calls of shankho trumpet the moving air
during pray-hours, and someone asks 
'Well, hell! Do they have to be so loud?' 
and I say, yes, because this is their house. 
And you might not have seen 
the light of our homes glittering in the horizon
during Dashera, 
on Kali Pujo,
when the floors turn floral,
and there's music everywhere.
You might not have read about the pillaging 
of our long legacies that the wrath of faith has eaten, 
of tribe ingestion of preservers,
of the torchings of Devi Maa's hull,
but talks of harmony flood your nose. 
Harmony, harmony, harmony—you want it so bad, 
and so you put words in our mouths—
speak this and speak that! This is for the loving of our land. 
The joining of our hands. 
There's a reason we collapse time and time again, 
our hearts ransacked by the crisscrossing of treachery,
leaving behind lesions you will never heal
or carry
or live through.
You hail this spirit of new light that is your own, 
as a new dawn of incongruity nears, 
you let it sink through
simply because you can.

Snata Basu is a writer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her poetry has appeared on numerous literary platforms including The Opiate, Visual Verse: An Online Anthology of Art and Words. and Small World City.