Cricket on the BeachBy Samodh Porawagamage
A garden weeds in a photo. I take it
to a light and observe the salinity bubbling through the pores of the earth. Butterfly wings scatter in wind, synonym for overgrown memory. Once-a-boy finds no peace in the shade of branches sparsely covering the ocean view like the feeble instinct of a mother. Teaching Dr. Faustus, Priyanath Sir admonished that we lot have bonded more with computers than the earth. I wouldn’t have—not now—any qualms selling my thing for the gentle blue, orange sunsets, us whacking fulltoss kurumbatti* with proper bats into imaginary shark mouths. The anticipation of teeth marks when one washes back ashore. What wouldn’t I give for that now! Once there, a familiar face mishit a kurumbatti onto the window of a speeding car, and fifty thousand butterflies crashed along the road. *A kurumbatti is a premature, tiny coconut that falls out of the tree due to disease and/or malnutrition.
We Cremate Our Dead. We Don't Scatter the Ashes in You!
By Samodh Porawagamage
It better not be true that you demand an annual
blood sacrifice to respect the boundaries you drew for yourself! The elders are too scared even to elaborate. But I’ve read enough about the times of terror: the endless war, JVP rebellions, state-sponsored violence. All that fed you well, right? Off the record, so many dead dumped in you, and some pushed alive from helicopters into your churning mouth for our part of the deal. But we are soooo past it now. We’ll turn away the cliff diver under your mercy to make his living at Galle. We’ll sober up the drunk, redirect his fatal need for a bath elsewhere. Why, why did you ambush us in the holiday sleep? No, we don’t hope to get them back from you. But if there is a need, we’ll even dry you up! Dear SuBy Samodh Porawagamage
Dear Su,
Don’t believe it if you learn in Gesamtschule* that water is colorless, smelless, motionless, and so on. Among the living, I’m the best experienced to describe its properties: when the monster wave first jumped the horizon, it looked like pure white clouds falling far away. Then it was blue with a tinge of cloudiness. We were happy for the fish who were lying open-mouthed with bruises on their skin. “Wait one more minute,” Sapumal said to them. The third jump panicked us to run. It was incredibly high, so dark, and so terrifying as if it was now rushing an eternal nightfall. So much force to cover a vast stretch of the empty seabed! A mile at least! When it gathered pace to bounce close to the beach, it was darker than all nightmares combined, plus the deadliest you can imagine with your eyes clenched shut. Just as Sapumal grabbed my hand to run, I knew it wasn’t going to break its own record for the 3rd jump again, and was a wee bit thankful. *Gesamtschule is a secondary school system in Germany.
Futility of Clozapine in RestraintsBy Samodh Porawagamage
In this fugue, the snarling wave
torpedoes at us above the coconut trees. A man running ahead suddenly turns back to stop still, cross his arms, and take the wave on his face. And when I’m being hurled at two hundred miles per hour to die by crashing into a wall, somebody clinging on to a pole for his life jumps to grab me into safety as if he could fly the twenty feet to where I am against the torrent. The SearchBy Samodh Porawagamage
On the third day looking for you,
we enter an open hospital. Actually, a tent big enough to fit—by your count—a dozen blue whales; by mine, three hundred tusked elephants. It would astonish you—the number of bodies they have put in there. I don’t mind anything other than theories of your whereabouts. Every time I tell your dad you can swim better than me, he just pats my head. We separate to look in each makeshift bed. When I gently turn someone of your size to take a better look, their skin glues to my hands. I close those eyes and move on to the next, tearing up it wasn’t you. One girl had her mouth torn off. I hope they won’t use her for a horror film. She’ll come for me tonight. But now I wish the boy who grabbed my wrist with jelly hands to wheeze in the language of a different hell was somehow you! PredatorBy Samodh Porawagamage
I’m babysitting Ovin today. He's my
five-year-old cousin. We both refused to visit the temple on this Unduvap Full Moon Poya day* for very different reasons. The Predator makes a pulp of another Marine’s head. “See,” Ovin says, “monsters don’t have a shadow! The ghosts in Paranormal Activity were also shadowless.” He draws a link I simply can't debunk. So I call my aunt to check if he can watch this. The no-service shrill echoes in the living room like wails of the marine— Dillon his name—who lost his arm before being gutted with wristblades. Maybe death’s a privilege my teen brain can't grasp. Meanwhile, the Predator presses his buttons to cure the bruises he got from six-barrel minigun rounds. I know this gun. Once I tried to lift a model at Cadet camp and nearly broke my back. Now the Predator seems to be in pain. I think he's gonna lick his wounds like a cat. Oh no, the camera zooms in on his green luminous blood. Ovin says: "Even his blood drops are see-through, everything about monsters has no shadow." To prove him wrong, I escape the rainforest and float out of the tv. I’m at the Yala beach now. Watching with Sapumal and the crowd, a magnificent wave, the blue equal of Predator blood, rolls in from the horizon. A fish lands on my leg. I push it into a puddle we made. Predator roars. Wave gets close. Very high. Too dark. People farther out bolt past us, so we too race off. Then I stop to take a good look at the impossible beauty hunting me down... "Oh! wait, you!” Ovin grins, “you have seen a real monster. I see it in your face. What was it like? Did it have a shadow?" *The lunar monthly (full moon) day in December is a public holiday in Sri Lanka for religious observances. The tsunami also struck on an Unduvap full moon Poya day. Many Buddhists go to the temple on that day to commemorate the tsunami victims.
Samodh Porawagamage writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty & underdevelopment, and colonial & imperial atrocities. becoming sam, his debut collection of poetry selected by Jaswinder Bolina, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2024. These poems are from his completed manuscript All the Salty Sand in Our Mouth, a child's chronicle of the tsunami.
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