Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay
How to Write About the ROAD?
place yourself into [it]—VENTRILOQUISM
why now?— EPIPHANY
I can no longer not know something?
Why not yesterday >
How much STORY can you get in? role-play?
pull over at the next exit,
there’s a few options here:[1]
a. pull the curtains
b. take your clothes off
c. piss bottle
d. fight
[1] The poems are performing their own tricks! Verbal mischief! Riot!
What would it feel like to die for language?
Archive is writing back[1]—you have no idea how far you are?
writing [it] in real time? precisely the past: A GOOD STORY,
A BAD FICTION, A MANIFESTO—why you made them who
they are (“all times coexisting as one”) (“you could feel [it]”)
(“the aftermath”) *locked down on the move or a moving stuck*
to write {this} as a way to be, to walk the city close
like a mission, and could you do [it] again, but faster?
in parts, in shapes, in windows: A VISION
[1] “What is the language using us for?/It uses us all and in its dark/Of dark actions selections differ./I am not making a fool of myself/For you. What I am making is/A place for language in my life” –W.S. Graham
Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and the poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters' candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, La Piccioletta Barca, and Cream City Review, among others.