The Devourers

by Indra Das

a field breathing the cool of nighttime into the soles of your shoes.

I can almost hear other tongues behind his voice, like the overlapping tones of a throat singer’s song.

the stinking dark of fermented history.

Sometimes intimacy is the only way real magic works.”

Leave, if you think the only way to achieve intimacy is dry custom, the exchange of facts and labels, names and professions. Intimacy lies in the body and the soul, in scent, in touch and taste and sound. A man whose name you don’t know can tell you a tale to move you to tears, just by filling and emptying his lungs, by moving his tongue and lips, his fingers. Even after, you might never know him.”

Your eyes, planets of shallow sea

Why do you write?” “Why? I write to record, to study. For curiosity. To keep our stories in the worlds beyond our bodies.”

lungs hitching with the ghosts of questions.

The cobweb clots of clouds had torn apart after the rain, and hung threadbare in the dawn.

love is just a beautifully woven veil, to make pretty shadows out of a brutal war.

any man who rapes a woman is unfit to be a father by my side, even if he is capable of kindness.”

Stories are valuable.”

the shadows of my apartment growing cool enough to banish the whir of the ceiling fan.

His memories drift off him on the curling fumes of his sweat,

using my two bodies as her palace of bones and meat.

villagers wish away the howl-haunted dark with their tapers.