National Poetry Month : Monica Mody,

 

 

 

Illegal

Law dangles a carrot, says, respect the borders between the fictions I am writing. Law is wearing a dress you have seen before, a colonialist’s winking suit—sober in one light, tacky in another, writing into your skin a pact with your own oppressor. Nib tears your flesh & turns you into a specimen for technology to tear into, simulate.

Border is simulated reality. I cross borders, eschewing domestication. World is a wild place. Wild, configured by inhabitants, in law unrecognized—wild always has been inhabited. I cross borders between human & other to learn how to move from nature’s laws, how to coexist. Human-made laws want to write me into a single state of being—lock me into stasis of bordered condition. I am not a condition you can cure into finitude. I am moving like the force that connects dots, reprising unity that comes from mending what has been broken. We have never been broken & always will remember to find ourselves whole, again & again.

 

 

 

Monica Mody is the author of Kala Pani (1913 Press), the forthcoming Bright Parallel (Copper Coin), and three chapbooks including Ordinary Annals (above/ground press). Her writing appears in numerous international literary journals and anthologies (including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil, and the soon-to-be-published Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji), and has won awards including the Sparks Prize Fellowship (Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa), and a Toto Award for Creative Writing. To learn more about her work, visit her at www.drmonicamody.com.