Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: Satya Dash’s “Sonnet and a Half for Conceit of the Heart” is full of contradictions and overtakings—what appears as lust becomes an unlikely opposite in a “mere call for sanitation,” hair soon obscures the permanence of a tattoo, and the face of enlightenment is quickly transformed into the face of capitalism. Though the letter “X” teases symmetry, the poem’s form is a sonnet-and-a-half that drives the reader onward; in the end, we’re left in the middle.
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Sonnet and a Half for Conceit of the Heart
When no one in the kingdom touched X’s heart, he grew
hungry for the end of desire. It seemed like lust at first but turned
out to be mere call for sanitation—a symmetry imparted by morning
ablutions. X wanted everyone to remember he was the youngest
king in a thousand years. When years passed and he was no
longer young, the loss of this novelty bothered him. It was difficult
for his love of trivia to come to terms with aging. Still, no one
touched X’s heart. In X’s opinion, no one had ever touched him,
as a touch anywhere else didn’t count. Those that touched X
elsewhere grew tired of touching. To recover his mojo, X tried
fancy hairstyles and got a tattoo of his own face on his chest. He
walked around the capital bare, his chin bobbing above his inked
skull. But the recurring resurgence of hair on this wild acreage
of chest led to its eventual insulation. Frustrated, X sought clarity
through enlightenment on the banks of Yamuna. On the twenty-seventh
day of meditation, X died in his sleep. The doctors who did his post-
mortem found a jeweled hollow in place of the heart. They declared
him the truly enlightened one. They got tattoos of X on hairless
biceps and napes. X’s broad smiling face was printed on pieces
of paper that could buy things such as real estate, precious metal,
and health care. A new hybrid vegetable was named in his honor—X.
Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, Florida Review, Prelude, Cortland Review, and The Journal, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for the Pushcart anthology, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at @satya043
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