You relax in an outdoor seating area of a café.

It’s evening. Laughter floating from inside. Lights

turning on one by one in the street. Purple-streaked

sky. You don’t hear the ricochet of

guns or smell furious smoke an hour away.

You sip coffee, bitter-sweetness satisfying you

as you relax after your morning chores.

You read about the war across the border,

see military vans rush by. Soldiers.

A dust mote falls on the table. You wonder

how dust could fall on a table in a clean café

in a clean street on such a clear day.

You try to shake off another thought:

The dust of burning bodies—could the wind

carry them across the border? Could you be

breathing in the enemies? Drinking them

in your coffee? Eating them?

Have you become the man dying trying to save

his family, the child collapsing from his wounds,

the blood-soaked women?

You look at your fingers holding your cup

and you don’t recognize them as yours.

Pramila Venkateswaran is the author of numerous poetry collections, most recently Exile Is Not a Foreign Word (Copper Coin, 2024) and We Are Not a Museum (Finishing Line Press, 2022), winner of a New York Book Festival award. From 2013 to 2015, Venkateswaran was the poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island. She is the codirector of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival.