Unremember

// Preeti Vangani

One way of bringing you back is to not
be a child, be an adult and pray as if faith
is a Lightsaber dangling on science’s head
as if me whispering your name will move
your lips within the garlanded frame

Another way is to bring back the hot of the rexine
Who knew guest beds in hospitals were well tucked
with drugged fevers making it impossible to sieve
dream from memory: What could I have said to raise you
from the dead? What do volumes full of elegies have
that I don’t?

Their own inabilities to say the unsaid to the one who will
unsee unhear untouch unmove un-understand, understand
I am trying to backpack through the geography of a future
without you, my compass, and no one has written a Lonely

Planet Guide titled Where To Go When Grief Strikes, as in
let’s produce a reality TV show for contestants to adventure
through absences on a shoestring budget and give them plenty
constraints: Today you are not allowed to take the deceased’s

name. Today you are not to remember the way they smiled
when they said yours. You’ll be disqualified if you re-enter
the symmetry of this world with longing as your wild card