KUNDIMAN 20TH ANNIVERSARY POETRY PORTFOLIO

The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Seven: “Love Poem with Prosopopoeia”

By SUMITA CHAKRABORTY | 09 MAY 2024

By Viviane Sassen — Image by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

I once lay on a floor
while a woman
dangled a speaker
from a wire,
and from that speaker
came the sounds
of a black hole,
and into that black hole
I imagined sending
a sound of my own,
low and tremulous,
so I could sing along
with gravity.
In my dreams, I scream
at the forest’s shoreline,
and after a brief, velvet
pause, the forest
screams back.
It means something:
to know you are alone,
and then to learn
that you are wrong.

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and a scholar, and the author of the poetry collection ARROW (Alice James Books/Carcanet Press, 2020). She is currently working on a second poetry manuscript, titled THE B-SIDES OF THE GOLDEN RECORD, as well as a scholarly book that is under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press and is titled GRAVE DANGERS: POETICS AND THE ETHICS OF DEATH IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. Beginning in Fall 2024, she joins the faculty of the University of Virginia as assistant professor of English and Creative Writing.

KUNDIMAN 20TH ANNIVERSARY POETRY PORTFOLIO

One Refugee Poet's Origin Story

By PICHCHENDA BAO

Today, someone will ask me / to write about war. / And I can write about it / because I am alive now.

KUNDIMAN 20TH ANNIVERSARY POETRY PORTFOLIO

First Prayer

By SHIREEN MADON

Into my home, invited Anahita, divinity of waters / of giving me my daughters

POETRY

“Most of the Children Who Lived in This House Are Dead. As a Child I Lived Here. Therefore I Am Dead" and Three Poems

By SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

Next to the black upright piano was a window, which looked out at the blue pansies, which were also sometimes purple, or yellow, like the word contusion.