2 Poems

by Karthik Sethuraman | March 2021 | Web Exclusive, Poetry

man in the land of Uz

you don’t know the first thing
about a crow

where to trace its roots
when to call the doctor

in the summer
what words to say to its siblings

you keep a quiet house
on sundays         you lay your plenty
under the basil           your mother
taught you everything is not promised
in the rain         ants creep into your
grooves            you are somewhere
between a sound and a thought

you cannot hold the line
in memory feathers are flares
look here          torment is a
noise the mind makes in the dark
the crow sleeps on your

windowsill the only way
it knows how with a picture of
god under its pillow

Sleepwalker, Nightwalker

Say a boy
Not knowing the first thing about a crow
Alone and lifting up a chipped shingle
In winter a bird’s roots
And lifting up the phone
A dial tone

Here’s a syntax for condolence
Keep a quiet house a few words
Lay nothing in the dew

A poem
Harvested from its carcass
Don’t ask for what remains
Earthworms mulberrytree
Palms enclosing a moth

A body
Remembers where it comes from
Even lingering or wrapped

A poet
Invents an explanation for how
A line leads to itself
To a poem
To a noise the mind makes in the dark

And nothing’s enough
To offer for what’s missing
A bird and every living thing in the cold

A family
Home to find the window open
Child on the rug and shivering.
Blankets to hold in the heat when there is none
A poem ending
The way it began

Say a crow
Lying on the windowsill
The only way it knows how
With a picture of god under its pillow

Karthik Sethuraman, “man in the land of Uz,” Fairy Tale Review (Web, March 2021).
Karthik Sethuraman, “Sleepwalker, Nightwalker,” Fairy Tale Review (Web, March 2021).

About The Author

Karthik Sethuraman is an Indian-American living in California. His recent works have appeared in Fugue, Lunch Ticket, Hot Metal Bridge, Kestrel, and Berkeley Poetry Review. He was a 2019 fellow at Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Along with English language poetry, he spends time reading and translating poems from the Tamil diaspora.

As a child of diaspora, my fairy tales often had many components—pieces picked up at home, stories learned at school. This poem marries Job’s Uz with my grandmother’s crow, our rituals of feeding it, and the stories I imagined through the intermediate spaces.