Winter 2021 | Occasus | Issue 11.1
Soothsaying
After René Magritte’s “Clairvoyance”
Who came first
the egg or the birdie? Never mattered: mutilations and engineering and engineered mutilations have skewed history. The new question is who will go last. Feather-plucked, feather-loosening wings hang from a pulverizing frame. The vertebra doesn’t shatter all at once; it displaces itself by the moment before it finally disintegrates without leaving a trace particle in the air. The lone eggshell conceals clairvoyance: viscous amnion waiting to pass down someone’s throat, or to commence a doomed lineage-- like the torchbearer at a game trying to ignite a cauldron full of water-- the child shrinking into itself and restructuring for survival. Cracking through calcium. Winged. Waiting. For the turn of the tide, the ancestral calling, the boot-stomp on the trachea. |
De-Creation [Record for the Future kind]
I.
On the first day / we noticed the last of the bees / had disappeared / the children of the new generation / knew of bees / from their mandatory end-of-days lessons / not by the sting in their palms / on a windy day.
II.
On the second day / the waters were poisoned / it was elimination / by acid / metal / sewage / and debit.
III.
On the third day / the soil cracked / the crevices deep enough / to dump the dead / near the plague-pits / the preachers cried of divine retribution.
IV.
On the fourth day / the seeds were frozen / and preserved in metal pods.
V.
On the fifth day / the rich left in shuttles / all infrastructure dismantled / fissured rock and asphalt / —stomach consumed itself.
VI.
On the sixth day / silence fell / no capacity / to lift hardened tongues / gasoline came free / with prized bottled water / mercy-killing and all / the steel clouds were grim-reaping / the silver glint hummed: soon.
VII.
On the seventh day / we found the bees.
|
Mnemosyne
The last ray of the eclipse
perforates my eye. I have seen too much. Blood trickles along my cheekbone like a perfect ink spill. Trying to re-member the broken eye, re-writing the memory of the world, the cracked gaze. Like the silhouette in the agora sizing you up, is now a mulberry bush. An alien hand under your skirt, now the slither of your beaded sweat. The light-siphons of the world on film, never captured right, always over-exposed. Memory, the swirly pothole water, where the trees bud from clouds. To the ruptured eye, all-gazing, all-glazing eyeballs beaded into my hair give the verdict: Jam a pen into the cut and let the wound close around it. |
Akshi Chadha is a fourth-year English and Creative writing student. Her works have been published in The Roadrunner Review, Watch Your Head, Symposium, and Salve. Her writing interests vary across genres but her first love has always been poetry.