Assistant Editor Connor Yeck: In Kirun Kapur’s “Prairie,” a single word bridges memory, landscape, and elegiac praise. Through transformative recollection, our speaker recalls a figure whose presence and language redraws even the most familiar of spaces: “in his mouth // peacocks cried in all the covered wagons— // an accent prowled open / land.” The result is a poem that yearns and cherishes in the same breath, and that contains remembrances both massive and minuscule, the “muscled animal that haunts / my quaintest calico.”
Prairie
for Inder Lal Kapur, 1929–2020
He said it
like it had a roar inside.
The little girl, the little house
had stripes and teeth—
in his mouth
peacocks cried in all the covered wagons—
an accent prowled open
land, the Ma, the Pa, America—
all tawny
Bengal butter churn,
a muscled animal that haunts
my quaintest calico, my sweetest
bonnet, father, memory.
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). She teaches at Amherst College, where she directs the creative writing program.
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