Fable of the Desirous Abecedarian

Satya Dash

Ashamed of his sudden arousal during a meeting, a memory that

burst forth catching him off-guard, he babbled away non-sequiturs to

conceal the fact that he had a notebook hugging his crotch, a

dagger, metaphorical of course, slipping against his ribs due to a recent

estrangement from the potential love of his life—a

fairytale romance that took a sinister detour when the new

government, surveillance obsessed, out to erase any tenderness

hovering inside the minds of residents, tried to institutionalize the

individual, by sending out ‘Against Eros’ armies flaunting

jacked biceps & washboard abs, raiding pubs, malls & sunset points,

kidnapping those who raised concerns, tasked with first hunting down

lovers who had scored maximum yearning points on the pheromone

magnetic reader, a radar that captured hazy wavelengths of romance on a

national scale & assigned a score to the perpetrators, the algorithm

originally equations the science minister’s daughter had noted while solving

projectile motion problems in preparation for a physics Olympiad, prioritizing

quality over quantity in her approach to questions, which serendipitously

resonated with the need of the hour for her dad, who when asked over phone to

strategize immediately in concise mathematical steps a radical move to help win

the next election for his party, in a leap of desperate faith, noticed a solitary page

under the table and found in striking handwriting the ways, he stated, to

visualize intangibles, the assertion creating commotion overnight, a team to

workshop this theory into outcome assembled instantly, speculation—if

x was love, could x be solved for—was rife & if yes, what value could it

yield the state, to which the answer was unanimous—how do we control the

zodiac, & someone cleared their throat & suggested, why not start with desire.

SATYA DASH is a recipient of the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship and the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. He has also been a finalist for Platypus Press's Broken River Prize. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Prairie Schooner, and Cincinnati Review, 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 Pushcart, Nina Riggs Poetry Award, Orison Anthology and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043