By Sujash Purna
One Day in the Life of a Daydreamer
The blue book with Whitman’s face
peers at me with the graphically
enhanced shadow of doubt.
I don’t learn to sing, but to dream
with my eyes open, no captain
for a borderline personality disorder.
My name is not on the list on the back
of the paperback because I am still
processing the pandemic, a fever dream:
A pentagram tattooed across her back,
a poet writes in couplets about men
becoming monsters in kaiju defects,
but I continue teaching my class, masks
on, fortunately, or I would have Zoomed
in from a hospital bed if there’s any left.
I remember $3 reading fee and a gut-punch
knowing I don’t earn a living for five
months, living stimulus to stimulus.
Today I didn’t wince over my breakfast
for the hunger to be an invisible name
trying so bad to be visible on the back-
a tattoo or a blue book with others- graphically
enhanced, perhaps shadowed by age,
pressed gently by the fingertips of a lover.
Sujash Purna, born in Bangladesh, is a graduate student at Missouri State University. His poetry appeared in South Carolina Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Kansas City Voices, Poetry Salzburg Review, English Journal, Stonecoast Review and others. He has a chapbook collection Epidemic of Nostalgia from Finishing Line Press.
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