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SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

Cabinet of Natural Curiosities


In the cabinet beside your bed,
there are no plastic orange containers,
no doll-sized eyedropper with vials of clear
liquid. I have no leeches, no botanical remedies,
no dragonflies dried and pinned to wood.
No horse made of sticks in a cardboard
box. I waited for you in a field—here I can
not recognize—of pressed mallows,

or were they phlox. There is no thorn. I’ve come
to collect the bottle that fed. All that we
caught we left behind, all that we missed
we carried. For years I have shored this.
These were all lies. Soft now—
the lowing of beasts, the weathered keenings.



NOTE:  "All that we caught we left behind, all that we missed we carried" is from the 2003 Loeb             edition of the Homeric Hymns:



Sumita Chakraborty is the Assistant Poetry Editor at AGNI Magazine (www.agnimagazine.org). A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts and a graduate of Wellesley College, she plans to pursue graduate studies in English literature in the future. She blogs at www.deliberately.wordpress.com.



Boxcar Poetry Review - ISSN 1931-1761