Track Ten: “Metaphor”

Track Ten: “Metaphor” Sumita Chakraborty (bio) Keywords poetry, Sumita Chakraborty, outer space, aliens, exploration, family, ghosts, landscapes, forests, mountains, water, curses Once, when I was writing a poem,I asked myself what my sister’s ghostlooks like. The question turned out to be very hard to answer.You have seen some of our mountains,some of our forests, our bodies of water. I went to a placethat had all three of these things.I walked and I climbed and I stared for days. Stray cats kept me company,as did, increasingly, my own intoxication.In the end, I made of her ghost a wreath of connected moths.But I will take and carry you within,wrote one of our poets once. I imagine the sentence as somethingof a curse. We are spentanswering its call. [End Page 164] Sumita Chakraborty sumita chakraborty is a poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books [US]/Carcanet Press [UK]), which received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. She is currently writing a scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. The recipient of honors from the Poetry Foundation, the Forward Arts Foundation, and Kundiman, she is assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Copyright © 2023 The Massachusetts Review, Inc