by Károly Sándor Pallai

Helpless, exposed furrows on the foreheads
of peasants lost in the poisonous vegetation.
No existential soothing potion or parentheses
to rescind the sonorous humming of break-neck
liberty nestling in the silence of the praying wheels.
Beguiled fate, dispossessed bodies, organs traded
under the indigent heavens of Kathmandu. Withered
scrotum, yellow sounds of the distant city. The men
are crying, coughing up the phlegm of oozy
and fortuitous terror. Corrugate histories relating
the russet nightmares of stolen kidneys in the lingering
perfume of the organ traffickers. Voiceless trails
of evaporating brightness. Who owns the exsanguinous
hopes of these devoured people imprisoned
in the camphorous violence and the sweating mirage
of mortal lies? The prowling, lurking, festering death
wanders among these destitute souls eating itself in the ears
and arteries. Who remembers these afternoons of ironclad
defencelessness? Who can redeem their lytic future?
An open-air morgue of chlorine and incense. A perennial
collective burial. A coalified, failed supplication.

Editor’s Note on Nepal Incubus:

Nepal Incubus is not Károly Sándor Pallai’s first piece of work in Eastlit. The following pieces have also been published:

• Three Poems featured in Eastlit June 2013.
• Myanmar Ode was in Eastlit August 2013.