satya dash

ODE TO FLESH

my head severed is an artifact of singular delight 
but it needs the illicit love of frame to survive

how else can a twanging machine service itself
how else shall this sparring town survive itself 

my body’s more chapel than choir, more sand
than sapphire, sewn on churchless bone, stitched 

to the roil of blood, now causing tides unknown,
now making serpents groan, this cacophony in 

pure nerve, orifices vialing the world’s temperature,
all gnarling & somber, maps pocked with melanin, 

roads in cellulite & humbling ochre, here turning 
alabaster sheath, there tilling wasteland heath

we have bodies, we hardly know what to do with them
at birth this was fresh hyacinth, now it’s swaying poplar

oblivious to glints of day buried in its creaking bark
this is how an institution works, no angelic miracle,

no Houdini act, but the hustle of breath, the rush to 
feed a frothing mouth, the rave to seal a parting wound 

the still life of sweat lines hauled up in skin nets like 
dead fish slipping across the sea’s writhing glass

this is the epistemology of raw earth – raining red birth,
soaking, snarling, screaming to fill a second’s girth – 

I don’t know if this is joy, but I’m alive

SATYA DASH'S POEMS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED OR ARE FORTHCOMING IN PASSAGES NORTH, COSMONAUTS AVENUE, THE FLORIDA REVIEW, PIDGEONHOLES, GLASS POETRY, PRELUDE, AMONGST OTHERS. APART FROM HAVING A DEGREE IN ELECTRONICS FROM BITS PILANI-GOA, HE HAS BEEN A CRICKET COMMENTATOR TOO. HIS WORK HAS BEEN TWICE NOMINATED FOR THE ORISON ANTHOLOGY. HE SPENT HIS EARLY YEARS IN ODISHA, INDIA AND NOW LIVES IN BANGALORE. HE TWEETS AT : @SATYA043