She Will Not Stir

by Elina Kumra

Rapid tweets across the valleys of the Kashmir,
where murmurs grow to roars, quelled by fog —
the hourglass frozen for the lost child on the lonely path.
Longing to chronicle the rape red-hot incident, the cast-off
gas canisters around their soles, chucked
onto the innocent paths of Dalits. (Go home? I am home. You
go the fuck home.)  

To defy that, to peer into
oppression, scanning the ever narrowing
lens — yet masked. Rally! The lone wolves
snared in the open mic. We see you.
We see you, the screens retort, no matter
how they march; one slings an insult, a gun at a face,
eye against eye, and the frail sense of collision.

Meetings of eyes wrapped in the grey
mist, glacial water poured on smoldering trails,
like venom leeched from an injured source,
while anguished lips form a plea —
“I can’t breathe” — under the city’s callous
clamp. Justice? See beneath
your boot’s imprint. That’s the rugged truth:
that within the lens peers
not but a shadow,
a tale and you, stoking it… their
rebellion, defiance, scratching at survival.
You cradle your face as if in a farewell
or conceding to dreams. She will not stir.

Elina Kumra is a 17-year-old Junior living in San Jose, California. Her poems and fiction have been published in Quarterly West, Wingless Dreamer, Reed Magazine, Up North Lit, Writer’s Digest, StreetLit, Coffin Bell, Polyphony Lit, Death Rattle, Typishly, Cathexis NorthWest Press, Tint, and Peauxdunque Review. She is Reed Magazine Emerging Voices Winner, a Finalist in Quarterly West, Fractured Lit, Ouroboros, and a Semi-finalist in the Nine-Syllables Chapbook Contest.