Dida and the wall are in the middle of a conversation
that uses a dead language without translation or root.
The wall is her accomplice. She plans to bomb the roof
for not letting her see the sky. The wall knows nothing
about the blue that echoes across the earth, a kind of caul,
a kind of wall constructed for the living. But the wall will
readily join such an insurgency. Who does not want to see
what is on the other side? Sometimes as the snake-heads
of mourners keep rising through the house I want to yell
she isn’t dead, only dying—do you all also open your
umbrellas long before the rains—they say there is a roof—
what rain. Dida who has kidnapped the rain in her body
without seeing the sky. Dida who sees nothing but sky.
Karan Kapoor
Karan Kapoor is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. A finalist for the Tusculum Review and Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook prizes, their poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, fiction in JOYLAND and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review. The Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS, you can find them at: karankapoor.net
