(Southern Celestial Hemisphere)
His face aching, emotionless and unflinching, he declared, 'my parents are getting a divorce'. Mother cringed; she spied at the vacant screen of her cellphone; barren moonscape; her lips trembling; an ephemeral rictus... 'How was the school'? I pivoted; and we are back to the mundane mendacity of daily vagaries; are you taking your medicines or avoiding the dust mites as we discussed during the last visit; as if nothing else is of import; I never have seen Cherub's father; maybe he is unemployed and he smokes the cheap cigarettes he buys from the Reservation; maybe he does not come home every evening, and maybe he does not read bed-time-stories to his cherub son; a childhood without the purple Teletubby, or the Berenstein Bears; Cherub must have born with the burden of mountains. It was fifteen-minute-visit and Cherub did fine with a fantastically normal spirometry; newer biologics are doing exactly what they are supposed to; but my God this wistful morning surely is not anthropomorphic!
I rather be a cold-face stone of Paleocene; or at best, a speechless
Neanderthal; and let the thieves run the polity.
I glide backward to the dawn of hominids when the genome is still
waiting to be tinkered with that ultimate thinking gene of inane
vacuity.
M. Zaman was born in a quiet village in eastern Bangladesh. He attended a medical school in a picturesque district town; and then, searching for El Dorado, crossed the oceans , bused tables at the 21 East 52 Street in Manhattan; worked in morgues, dissected human bodies, looked into the intricacies of human pathology; and now – as his daughter says ‘an allergist extraordinaire’.
Over the past year many of the poems are published in both print and online literary magazines including High Shelf Press, the Stardust Review, the Black Horse Review, the Atlanta Review, Cathexis North West Press, Poet’s Choice, Poems from The Lockdown (Willowdown Books), Punt Volat, and La Picciolata Barca etc
He is married to his lovely wife. He loves history and philosophy. He writes; he lives on Raquette River and he drives an old Subaru.
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