NVN Saturday: THE PERFECT HOME
by Indran Amirthanayagam
while Lahaina, Maui burns August, 2023
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May I imagine the scene? Do you agree? Coffee in the studio, light streaming in, brushes and easel, a multi-hued cat? But flames are rising at five hundred yards. Oh to leap beyond particulate matter, to dream, go native again, python wrapped round banyan branch, peeping through the window while monkey hops over the ledge and books, to the sugar bowl, scatters the grains, attracting flies, mosquitoes, the ubiquitous roach. Paradise does not look sweet. Fireball blows up history, belief, certainty, and cars, drivers burned at the wheel, while thousands of miles away as all birds fly, by pure chance, living on the mainland, in another corner of the great expanse of the once blue ball, I try in vain to catch and douse embers flying this month’s perfect storm.
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Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.