-Jenny Michell (first published in Perhappened Mag

-Neal Zetter

-by Kushal Poddar

The Farmer’s Wife of The Moonshine Village

A shadow, familiar, slips inside
the farmer’s hut, and
at the same time the farmer’s wife
bears some new
stains of black and blue,

and she knows – the man has
a long day screwed into
his sun bitten skull,
way too deep to indulge
in any thought other than
of moonshine
and of raw contact between
skin and skin, brawn and brawn, thew
and thawing away marriage.

And always she sleeps
through the proceedings,
denies all before
the white skinned social worker,
tells her, “Why don’t you fix
the council and the banking?”

Blood crawls down and up
the gutter for a while, and
then clots into a comatosed dream

-Kushal Poddar