Two Poems
Exposure
There’s a glitch in the matrix!
I am buying clothes that don’t fit me,
fucking myself for a taped-up video camera, denying myself
such special pleasures: dinner, london, you. The peaches
we buy ripen too quickly and I’ve been writing about figs again.
Why won’t you tell me what the subway smells like?
Tell me what you know about extravagant indifference.
Can you tell me who this poem is for? Do you want it
for yourself? None of this is about you. You’re replying
to my texts again and I think your girlfriend is obsessed
with me, which means nothing except that a better world
is possible, though not like this. I am on the rooftop
and the skyline is glowing in dust. The basil,
its fungus; 2020, all one bad joke. It is autumn again
and we are all growing older; can’t we go to the party?
Sometimes I forget Jupiter is pulling us closer, slick
galaxy-stained fingers that named us. If it had eyes
we’d be so afraid: how mystical. How extraordinary.
Come here. You can take my clothes off for me. I can pluck
new peaches for you, feed them to you while we fuck.
Prestige
“Keats is dead so fuck me from behind”
—Hera Lindsay Bird
I am begging you to let me peel an orange
for you
with my teeth
on video camera. I am begging you
to let me dance [for you] like a swan, you know,
the ballerina kind—
I used to be able to do a triple pirouette at the age
of 9 but no one was there to watch me
yet
.
I spent my late teens begging people to put screenshots
of my poems on their instagrams: I am begging you
to let me let you watch me while I undress. Algorithmic swthrt bby
I am so deliciously surveilled: I only like it when someone is watching
I only like it when it’s a machine. Will u b my little computer bitch boy.
Will you print my poem out and stick it on yr wall
& come to it
just for me?
∩
Umang Kalra is the founding EIC of VIBE and the author of fig (2022). She is a two-time BoTN finalist, and a Pushcart and Nina Riggs Award nominee. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Mizna, Protean, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere, and was featured on the podcast Close Readings.