Poem: In the Love Quarantine

By Rini Bhattacharya

I am diagnosed a chronic love-sick
I live in a queer love quarantine.
I am placed under ventilation
And not supposed to move at all.

The other part of the morbid tent
Stays a cold, silent, bizarre morgue.
There thirty love-dead are lying
Fifteen females and fifteen males.

My heartbeats are the sole sound
Among these unnatural quietude.
No doctor, no medicine, no nurse
There nowhere are any such entities.

I free myself from the machines…

I am getting up from the bed desperately
I wade through to reach the morgue.

I spell out whispering love hymns
For all these dead love-couples.
Their mating rituals are complete
The channel rings the bell of joy.

Magic shakes in the death spot
The ventilation waves unknowingly.
My own soul is travelling to search
For my own loving death partner.

The quarantine shivers by high fever
By bubbling cries of un-awkward love.
I roll on from the quarantine gate out
In the sands of melancholic breeze.

Bio:
Rini Bhattacharya is a bilingual poet from Kolkata, India.

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