Indrani Sengupta

here in the Olde

you wax poetic, prophetic, scene-set the country so you know what color her garters are. it is imperative that you know your country’s garters from another country’s garters. to fail is punishable, steel-boned corset cinching the sex out of you. country has a steel-boned corset; let’s call it industry. country tosses and turns, heaves luxuriously, sweats rivers with no hands on them. pristine country with its inexhaustible curlicue of briars and bines, letterlike but not quite. you want to name country for your father but you are not country’s father. you want to put holes in country, stick your tongue inside her ear, just a little. you want to sublimate country into a tear-shaped locket you can wear while dabbling in the pillowy mountains and taut riverboats and orchards, orchards of other countries. country lousy with perhapses, where you are and are and never arrive. country whose rage is always with you and never at you, not really, not if you say please. you want to claim country but never more than you want to be claimed by country, for her to unstanch her metals, her great-titted fault lines, reveal the warp and woof that runs through everything. speak to you in the hush-hush of your mother’s mother’s tongues: oh bunting, oh ortolan for my cream, how I could eat you up.