Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters’ student in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Connecticut River Review, among others. 

www.lagnajitam.com
@lagnajita14
email: lagnajitam@gmail.com

elegy for gas station

Some empty and some never closed, pull up in the dawn, locking my door in far-off screens with someone else’s gallon count and taking turns. What I remember: rush hour cheap coupon. Ninety cents off and forever more. Into endless need, half-abandoned. You filled the tank. In the aftermath, you knocked on the window for me to let you in, and in doing so asked me to undo something that was already done. I can’t remember what Tongo said about book pages in the gas pumps. That Ma told you to take care of me as we were leaving, or that you did something else entirely, seething. It is every fear in the effort of hiding. Every convenience that threatens to kill.

a road trip, or a series of fights

we yawn no matter how we feel! America is good!

—not like sleeping horse standing up in the meadow

or the sway of the road in the dawn—

you scream like a Flash! I will never leave, you say to hurt me!

—not like home is an endless search or how bears

hibernate but how I pass time—

Sweating and not in the Kerouac Sense! Waking up with covers drenched in your own piles! Every other chore! Probiotics and a B complex! I think I may be low

on magnesium!

—not as if the trains carry only cargo in this country, baggage stretched across the tracks on a hot day, train hopping—

i was a lightning rod! caught all your fury like a fishing net, dancing in my mouth! you believe so much wrong!

—not if states fought over Manson’s body, or war primer, or missing the lie of you fabricated—

there is your sense of boredom or a fear you cannot face! Casual text racism! Streets are empty, almost! You told me to spend a lot of time through the driftless!

—not the petty individualists of your people, or the country’s love for abandoned spaces or abandon in general but—

one big suburb! it’s free to be clean! don’t call me family or this sacred murder but a worldwide silence! a road trip, or a series of fights!

is that spring or a noose

is that a smoke above your bed or

steam off the asphalt

your head is so close to the ground anyways

lower than your feet on the hills of san francisco,

food poured sideways

is that music or a gun

a bow

a repeat of the night before

is that a grown, growing, stuck?

or a birth, birth, running through the station

my head is so far from you anyways,

and i smile smile

How will you begin?

I had a dream that we were in different hotel rooms.

I have not given birth to anyone. 5/25 8:45 am, it was a dark place. I knew you were hiding, by thanking the question. I was running away, might fuck around.

I remember a bus with a blue sky. Sticking my head out the window. Dropped off at your house. Your house as a parking lot, and I laugh. I’m walking, I’m walking then.

2. telling truths horizontally

Your long driveway leading to a strip of so many cars.

I walked through your house. I don’t know anything. Unpacking. Running them over. Parking. All of us in a circle, looking at each other. A hotel room, a house and please don’t cry Like buildings in America. Reborn.

I don’t remember the rest: inherent. Nobody has died yet: irredeemable sin. 5/17 8:30 am, I wake and think of him. Whenever I die I notice / I am born again and I return / from absence to absence. 11:04 am. I’m hungry, hungover. I looked around, and you looked at me. I want to live according to this love. I wake in terror.