There Are Problems in the God Factory
- Jul 26, 2019
- 1 min read
by Rita Mookerjee
and I know this because I can’t hear anything over the clatter of dead kid bones. The god planners sweep them up to grind into meal or paste to bolster the factory walls
then fumble with hot clay, dropping foul-mouthed half-golems across America who stomp and spin to distract everyone from filthy water in Flint and caged babies at the border. The planners shrug, the country is rotten anyway.
To the tune of prayer, the golems spear the dead and roast away the soured flesh. At night, the planners roll up the blueprints and the tracing paper, delicate as mothwing. The golems will crack soon and mix with
bonedust. Meanwhile, I light agarbatti and hide behind digital banshee queens. because each glance at the news makes my jaw clench. My teeth chip as my body serrates its edges.
The planners don’t notice. They look to their records for inspiration. Sekhmet? Kali? Mars? Old Testament? There’s no shame in returning to the classics, so they open a cask of sea-water wine and draw up some new prototypes.
Rita Mookerjee’s poetry is featured in Aaduna, GlitterMOB, Sinister Wisdom, Berfrois, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and a poetry staff reader for The Southeast Review and [PANK].
