Shome Dasgupta

Frozen: like back then when we held hands

during 

          Mardi Gras—Cajun Field, night:

          loud—a chandelier palace. 

The floats 

already trickled 

          through, trumpets and beads

—like watching memories blurred into picture

frames, never hung on any wall. Carnivals

and carousels—cotton candy and teddy bears

made for dizzied heads. Live music on stage—

Cowboy Junkies and Wayne Toups echoed above 

our voices. Your tiny black bag with thin straps,

full of tin cans

          —we were too young then. Look

at us now, amid the past we hear cackles and crackles

while the horns distanced themselves from our tongues.

          Two statues on the porch steps, a pup with a bent leg 

          and wise eyes—our hands still clasped like we never 

          moved. 

Only the world kept its gravitation—us two 

etched in the sky, between this star and that star:

          between those nervous seconds before the tangerine 

          landed on my Chicago Bulls hat, I knew

what it meant to love freckles.


Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), a prose collection, Histories Of Memories (Belle Point Press), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the series editor of The Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.