Amit Majmudar

Richer than mother's milk is half-and-half. Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal jelly, may we at Benares and Boston, Philly and Delhi collect our birthright nectar. No swarm our own, we must be industrious, both queen and drone. Being two beings requires a rage for rigor, rewritable memory, hybrid vigor. English herself is a crossbred mother mutt, primly promiscuous and hot to rut. Oneness? Pure chimera. Splendor is spliced. Make your halves into something twice your size, your tongue a hyphen joining nation to nation. Recombine, become a thing of your own creation, a many-minded mongrel, the line's renewal, self-made and twofold, soul and dual.

Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt. My laptop's in a bin. I dig out the keys from my jeans and do my best Midwestern grin. At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip is never enough for  a young brown male whose name comes up at random. Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe how Myrtle's searched in tandem, how Doris's six-pack of Boost has been seized and Ethel gets the wand. How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia when what they really want is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us and pat us top to toe, my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis, Mohammed alias Mo— my buddies from med school, my doubles partners, my dark unshaven brothers whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends, ourselves the goateed other.

Every tripod- toting birder knows it never nests on urban girders. Even fences set its scalded-crimson head askew, its waddle swinging, wings akimbo. Few have got it on their lists and fewer still have caught it singing, this endangered North American candor, cousin of the done-in dodo, big-eyed Big Sur tremor- tenor — only ten or twenty hang glide over Modoc County, humbly numbered (as their days are) for us crazy crown- and throat- and belly-gazers. Any niche as fragile as a candor’s renders its extinction certain. We can sabotage its habitat with half a laugh or quarter murmur, fluster coveys worth of candors off their branches, which, abandoned, soon are little more than snarking- grounds for minor birds, the common snipe, the yellow- bellied bittern.

Hell-raiser, razor-feathered risers, windhover over Peshawar, power's joystick-blithe thousand-mile scythe, proxy executioner's proxy ax pinged by a proxy server, winged victory, pilot cipher unburdened by aught but fuel and bombs, fool of God, savage idiot savant sucking your benumbed trigger-finger gamer's thumb

Some species can crack pavement with their shoots to get their share of sun some species lay a purple froth of eggs and leave it there to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti some species though you stomp them in the carpet have already stashed away the families that will inherit every floor at midnight But others don’t go forth and multiply as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo their keepers watching in despair or those endangered species numbered individually and mapped from perch to oblivious perch For weeks the world it seemed was plagued with babies forests dwindling into cradles rows of women hissing for an obstetrician babies no one could feed babies received by accident like misdirected mail from God so many babies people hired women to hold them babies babies everywhere but not a one to name When we got home the local news showed us a mother with quintuplets she was suckling them in shifts a mountain of sheets universally admired a goddess of fertility her smile could persuade the skies to rain Her litter slept ointment-eyed in pink wool caps while Dad ran his hand through his hair thinking maybe of money as he stood surveying his crowded living room his wealth of heartbeats Pizza and pop that night and there unasked inside the bottlecap was Sorry—Try Again you set it down and did not speak of it the moon flanked by her brood of stars that night a chaste distracted kiss goodnight that night your body quiet having spilled its secret your palms flat on your belly holding holding Forgive me if I had no words that night but I was wondering in the silence still begetting silence whether to console you if I consoled you it would make the loss your loss and so we laid beside ourselves a while because I had no words until our bodies folded shut our bodies closed around hope like a book preserving petals a book we did not open till the morning when we found hope dry and brittle but intact

Into the rood wood, where the grain's current splits around the stones of its knots, carve eyelashes and eyelids. Dye the knots, too—indigo, ink-black, vermillion irises. These will be his eyes, always open, willing themselves not to close when dust rises or sweat falls, eyes witnessing, dimly, the eclipse that shawls the shuddering hill, Jerusalem's naked shoulder. The body itself? From a wick that still whiffs of smolder, wax, because wax sloughs a smooth skein on the fingers just below sensation's threshold. Prop the cross upright and let the tear-hot wax trickle, slow, clot, taper into a torso, thighs, calves, feet. Of Gideon Bible paper, thinner than skin, cut him his scrap of cloth; embed iron shavings in his forehead, and, as the wax cools, scrape the rust off an old fuel can to salt the whole wound that is the man. Cry, if you feel like crying, and if no one else is there. Then set it on the counter with your other wares.

Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot. I know they said "third eye" in class, but it's not an eye eye, not like that. It's not some freak third eye that opens on your forehead like on some Chernobyl baby. What it means is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen eye, on the inside. And she's marking it. It's how the X that says where treasure's at is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.— All right. What I said wasn't half so measured. In fact, I didn't say a thing. Their laughter had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after World History; that week was India —myths, caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits. The white kids I was sitting with were friends, at least as I defined a friend back then. So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot? I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd— She wear it to the shower? And to bed?— whie Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad was getting ready for another stab. I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there. And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear, and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked circles till the red planet entered the house of war and on my forehead for the world to see my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats, their flesh in little puddles underneath, pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.