Pinion
The word for what
we do to what we
butcher: cure.
that tricks itself
out as a verb.
There’s no ellipsis
half as skeptical
as Sure . . .
as tricky as
the English were.
What you think you
shape shape-
shifts from verse to worse.
becomes the word for
crippling a bird.
Flag
Thirteen stripes scarring a slave’s
back quench fifty stars
*
to remind me how fiercely
I love it is burn
*
whether or not we name it
the hurricane’s here
*
even a tower in flames
is someone’s lighthouse
*
is how I learned which side of
my chest my heart’s on
*
into a triangle the
coffin is your own
—
Amit Majmudar‘s newest poetry collection is What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His verse translation of the Bhagavad-Gita is entitled Godsong (Knopf, 2018). He has served as Ohio’s first Poet Laureate, and he is also a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and internationally published novelist.