Self-Portrait as Clupea Harengus Pickled and Fed to the May Queen in Midsommar (2019)

after T.S. Eliot who would have been sacrificed at the Hårga

I too can connect nothing with nothing so please
forget the boy. It is not in my nature to be soothing.
but I promise you : his corpse won’t sprout.
His lungs will stay pinned inside his moonish chest.

Hurry up please Dani it’s time. You are made of sun now.
Drown in clover and primrose. Leave behind the pelts,
sinew, tallow, & sweat. Braid your throat with salt.
America doesn’t live here, she only comes when called.

For you there are yellow days ahead. Grain, beef, & eggs
go in a hole in the ground ; my dealings are with
the sublime. I chase a tincture made from thistle.
I plant my seed in bile before the barn.

Self-Portrait as the Edge of the Woods in The Lobster (2016)

they won’t tell you this but if you shimmy out
of locked pants and unzipped dresses, you are
bound to tear your skin. if this is you, I’m not
judging. I only wish that someone had let me know.
I have been waterboarded. I have knelt for hours on
scattered rice in a pigeon stance. I favor either of these
over the humiliation of defeat which always lives
shallow in the throat, a boiled egg still hot in
its lacewing shell. once I went to visit my mother
who was turned into a wolf & I brought meat
for her but since I couldn’t tell which wolf she was,
I fed them all a little & each one was distracted by
the scent of my blood. they let me leave because they
knew I’d be back with more meat. I am not pained
by this memory, but late at night when I think of
slick rebuttals to arguments that happened 12 years
prior, torture slithers in to lap at the soles of my feet.

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the winner of the 2023 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award and the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press). Her poems can be found in CALYX, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, New Orleans Review, and The Offing.