Doubt - Murad

Going to sleep I find shoes where the pillow should be and the pillow sitting in the shoe rack, turn on the light and the fan starts spinning, turn on the AC and the heater fires up, mix protein powder in water and it curdles into kheer, cook kheer and it won't set, runs off like glucose water, one thing leads to another mistake, Murphy has aimed all his ammunition this way, showing off every magic trick and miracle, right hand today is left, Mokbul sir trying to propose to Sweety ma'am accidentally says Shanti's name, from the old bottle of nationalist consciousness come fascist mangoes singing war songs instead of patriotic music, and I made an agent to write a poem and now the agent is ordering me to do all the work, in all this wrongness, one mistake after another, drifting in this current of errors, like a drowning man I'm looking for some straw to hold on to, doubt and fear, what if that last straw bites my hand


Murad is a writer and poet based in Michigan with ten books in Bengali. His poems explore displacement, identity, and the ordinary absurdities of staying alive. His work has appeared in Still Here and Molecule.