Poetry

Amnesiacs Confined in Bell Jars 

By Anindya Arif

Velouria, an amnesiac,
is constantly on 18 mg of

Percocet and LSD,
and Believes that the world
At its core, is merely symbolic.
She dreams of a
New resurgent world,
Born out of a casualty
of an era where
Everyone wakes up

With their regressive urges
Wrapped around their waist.

​

This new age of the Holocene
Privileges neo-romanticism
and encourages its citizens to use people

As scratching posts
to fill their disconnected sybaritic urges.
 

and for the moments
When the inhabitants feel bitter and apathetic,
The ruinous regime sanctions policies
Inspired by consequentialist philosophy.

Enraged by the new reforms, inhabitants
Form political rallies
on how the new sanctions would
Basically, would mean everyone
Waking up deranged and dead.

​

Entrapped in the ensuing violence,
and in a raging revelry,
and being high on Percocet and LSD,
Velouria, in her head, keeps hearing an

an old transient message saying,
“They are grappling with
the last bit of futility
of all the good things that ever happened

to them and how they
waited all April inside a vial
for someone to come and
replace their bones with glasses.”

​

Backwards, her world appears different;
it is an age of decadence and

Abandoned sentiments,
of vice and violence.
They stain rusted door hinges and flumes
With the pain from old wounds.
in the pockets of their braided jeans
They carry neediness
Measured in decibels.
Where they turn memories
of people into
Absentee colognes –
and they eat austerity measures
For lunch –
and store ghosts
of last-century maximalists
in ceramic cups and Kyūsu’s –
and use the
Shoulder blades
of past lovers

To cut holes in
Their manufactured
Epidermis –
and fill them with pheromones –
and plant magnolias to cover the holes.

​

Velouria, not knowing whether she is angry
or lovesick,
or the difference between
Truth and illusion,
or whether she is in her world
or having a paranoid schizophrenia,
Starts looking for a presage
From the glibness in her head
and finds her final reprieve
off of
The dissonance in drowning.​

​

ABOUT THE AUTHOR