I Took You to Botanical Gardens Until I Could Not

Abstract

I Took You to Botanical Gardens Until I Could Not Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay (bio) after Bhanu Kapil ________ Imagine the national flowers of contested regions. Every person who travelled here is unsteady a contested region, or i know bodies like that,almost linear, flat, or flower-imprintwith color drained out. Someone wrote on amap how it felt once and what it remembered.Both of us only wanted to see the tropicals. What are the maximum and minimum forms a memory can take? immortal, turned away from you, asleep,(which was rare, I hardly ever could)You did not ask this question, or any:I was a contest, given to the war, youCalled for unnecessary truce or a nationalentrance, or door shut in your face: what will you remember? What did you forget? lotus flower, the conversation between aBody and its image, a people Violated.I liked the humid greenhouses, and howThey were all the same in every city.Because people still love flower poemslike one violently opens in the nighttimeone pretends to be someone elseall of them erasure! a false bloom! Write about that You once laughed and said you gave it to meso quiet, but Do flowers remember?the ground, what they were ripped from,and for who— i say pluck instead; pull outfrom the fertile earth [End Page 42] alienate into glass vase or cut cut cut sell at the market Place together a bunch of plucksinto floral arrangement, to takewhen I would give anyway I am not afraid to throw blood on you in public i look up flowers to write these poems,the archives call it Economy, Trade,Exchange, but it is just another dark body:The Map tells us to walk counterclockwise:once you picture it all falls apart in your mind Just as the night eats every flower. a gardener, misplaced seeds,fed fried flowers and spit them out:You were not invited,but our house was our carrier,like spring cleaning the color of teeth,the country between usI Practice Lotus Pose Again Who are we when we are not with each other? Who are we when we are not alone? Author's Note Violation is the antithesis of love, indifference the enemy of memory, growing too big for the room. How to be ruined by someone you loved, to burn, spring-time caught together, stuck within a long drive. Or to never have loved at all, just unfurled, hidden, forgetting. Imagine a refusal for language, a partition of truth, a rotten root. [End Page 43] Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay 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 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. She is a master's candidate of Migration and Diaspora at SOAS. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Connecticut River Review, among others. Copyright © 2022 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents