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Rohan Chhetri

Bordersong

from NER 40.4 (2019)

We lived downwind of a bakery, 
butter sesame roasted black cumin.

From a mosque downwind drifted prayer 
erasing the gummy hour of the wolf, 
sleepy holler of a child muezzin.

We lived downwind of a temple. Incense, 
synonymous with the clear earache of a gong 
haloing a bell’s rim before withering to the ground.

Downwind of a cremation ghat, incense
another kind: cloying, rot-sweet, burning 
flesh masked in clarified butter woodsmoke hunger, 
all synonyms for the Lord’s true name.

From the butcher-shop, downwind musk of flensed pelt,
shit-gutted intestines, opaque green eyes on severed goat heads. 

Downwind we lived, too, of the army barracks, once 
a youth club, our lost tennis tables moonlighting 
for the feast of soldiers. 
              In the night fragrant with the tea gardens’ first flush
we heard the pain-astonished men thrashing upside 
down as a baton tore welts into their calves.

Our tall house stood downwind of a peaceful kingdom’s border. 
Odor of fermented betelnut. What the Rimpoche once 
bestowed to the cannibals in lieu of their blood-
rimmed thirst & craving of gnawbone. 
       Then one night, truck after stealth-green 
truck full of families packed to the hull 
like horses for the New World.

Downwind of the grimy brothels in the border town 
we visited as boys, petrified we would run 
into our own fathers. 
    Smell of talcum & attar 
that bloomed at nightfall & withered by dawn 
on a long Bhutanese street called Chinese Line.

And all the nameless villages in between 
blurred into one another in the nightly music 
that blared from crude speakers to scare 
the elephants marauding the fields.

Downwind of the two severed heads of the Liberation 
Front leaders hung from a branch of a guava tree 
            in the putrid summer of the old revolution
                    & the women marched in the gunmetal silence:
torches blinking in the rain, rhyme of old slogans 
plucked with the long flab of their tongues.    

Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke 
               in some young martyr’s evening.

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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