The One Arrested and Later Left at Our Doorstep

The missing one is restored to her apparition,
disoriented, oozy-blood,  
smelling like a marsh; two days’ve passed
since the protest fired up from the gully to the alcázar.

We ask the silence to nurse her.
Tim answers the media in waiting.
We blame the throne obviously.
The air stinks of conspiracy.

The missing one, reinstated, exists in flickers,
now here, now beside the basin, a hologram,
a substance, now a totem archaic,
now a numen, Jesus.

The protest flows with the paradigms.
Tim and I ask her what happened inside;
she seems to miss herself if only by a smudge of soul
or some slogan half finished. 
Silence bandages her; strings her together.
Media disappears to attend another somewhere.

Monkey’s Paw

A teargas shell tore off my bro’s hand;
since we called him a primate in childhood
we kept the hand, nicknamed it ‘Monkey’s Paw’,
presented it before every guest in our house,
cherished their shriek; the severed limb
just wouldn’t rot; the second hand revolutionists
often borrowed it for their demonstrations,
but no one asked my sibling what the paw
meant to him. Probably a missing link
in the evolution chain between Adam and Cain.
He wouldn’t have answered anyway, rather
scratched his arm’s end the way one alley cat
scratches the blind bricks when cornered
in dire need of some magic.

Kushal Poddar edited the online magazine Words Surfacing. He is the author of The Circus Came To My Island (Spare Change Press), A Place For Your Ghost Animals (Ripple Effect Publishing), Understanding TheNeighborhood (BRP, Australia), Scratches Within (Barbara Maat), Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP), and EternityRestoration Project- Selected and New Poems (Hawakal Publishers), and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel (Alien Buddha Press). Find him on Facebook and Twitter.