by Tuhin Bhowal
Already my belly looks like something to tolerate.
The navel; a wormhole
—head of figs when plucked
raw. Golden beard lacing only the left side of
My face. Burgundy, huh, says the barber
before touching, one more time after the trim,
his scissor-hands paying attention, like an average
mind to an anomaly. Balls
large as a burden. And the chest: a whole body
of hair; curling as an alphabet, limp, pliant,
as twigs of the
sohphie fruit—those bayberries—them, plucked
ripe, their skin more freckled than goosebumps
from a meadow where I was once a boy;
as the heart throbbing, cowering,
at the cusp,
into pleasure, furthermore, beyond disgust—
or that moment embalming it, exact, giving in
exactly; from the meadow
where no boy returns now… There was a time
when it rained for two million years. Imagine that.
I am now living that time.
Once, in a room,
rented, another man wanted to rest between
my thighs, like restlessness itself; offered
me a job I could not accept, or say yes to—
I think of that light often,
after having spoken to you,
that jaded June, easing, eating into the room—
all my straightness, and his strangeness; trafficking
our desires, in disorder, into despair:
that first release up, reconnoitring
what the moonlight had started to do.
Recipient of the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize 2022, Tuhin Bhowal has had poems and translations appear or forthcoming in Poetry at Sangam, Oxford Anthology of Translation 2022, adda, Cosmic Double, Flint Hills Review, nether, Parentheses Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Tuhin lives alone in Bangalore, India, and tweets @tuhintranslates.