Shalmi Barman

Souvenirs

Armor’s not enough: you will need ballast

to shore against the flood. These walls we built

can weather outbreaks, repulse UV flares,

pump disinfected particles of air

until the next all clear. Real hazard lies

within. In need of object permanence,

we fill the space through creeping days and weeks

with handmade terracotta fishermen,

botanic tapestries, a bullock cart

rendered in tribal print. Arrange with care

six painted elephants in dwindling ranks,

a turtle hungry for our cigarette stubs,

a sinuous pink-eyed heron taking wing

lightbulb clenched in its beak. Menagerie

or museum? Designed to occupy

or soothe the eye, spur after-dinner chat,

the CCTV mutely blinking while

outside the crows drop dead. Last summer when

the water index spiked, remember how

our guavas, never ripening, grew to rot?

The curfews grounding flights? That’s when you found

these soup bowls glazed in speckled indigo

with river reeds patterned around the rim.

I almost see the shallow thickets swarm

with bullfrogs fatly glistening by dusk,

their droppings mixed into this heavy clay

scooped up and sculpted, packed with paper curls

in boxes labeled FRAGILE. Still unchipped,

and, at this price, a steal. Let no one say

there are no marvels in a dying world.

Shalmi Barman, originally from Calcutta, India, earned a PhD in English from the University of Virginia after writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction. Her poetry has been featured in EcoTheo Review, Gyroscope Review, Blue Unicorn, Boudin, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere.