mitosis

from where god is, he must have watched
the kafilas muscle across a red-bitten earth like
ants driven out by the sting of smoke in hordes.

it must have been easier to see the crack in
the continent, a broken-up country like
broken pottery, land divided by eyes that

never saw it: a body cut in two, a mother
to share between two sons, an arm and a leg
for each of them. i went looking for that

crooked line and could never find it; instead
i found villages like empty hornet’s nests and
women in ashrams who forgot how to pronounce

their own name. we had been walking for a month and
a half, none of us knowing where one country ends
or the other begins. childhood left me like incense smoke;

i still go looking for it through the jackfruit leaves but
instead i see a man watch a girl beg for water before he
sets her on fire. in my dreams, a bird sits warm like a fig

in my hand, not knowing that it is dying. tomorrow is praying
i forget where i came from. in some future, i am a nani
saying that those times were bad, not the people.