Devi S. Laskar
from State of the Art, State of the Union
10. The tally miscounted
Not like it was Chinese takeout on a faulty phone line
with fifty people talking in the background. According
to the prophets and the fortune-tellers, the flies and frogs
were supposed to kick-start the end of times. Yet the talking
heads on TV were still smiling, pointing out in soothsayer
voices that not all seven plagues had visited. And the order
was wrong. First came the short-horned grasshoppers, locusts
really. Then a lengthy eclipse which some took to mean
the starting line for eternal darkness, but scientists
explained it away along with the Periodic Table and Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution. No flies, just fat-bellied frogs. No rivers
of blood, just ribbons of red dust and clay exposed from
the droughts, no death of first-born children except at the hands
of world war, road rage and ethnic cleansing, drunkenness.
It did rain for forty days and hail, but after the fire was already out.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of Gas & Food, No Lodging (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The Raleigh Review and other journals. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lives in California.
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