Two Poems

S.S. Mandani

Poetry

2/1/24

Progression

A holographic tunnel of light shot down from the city sky. As night fell, the bottom disc of the mothership lit up like a circuit board, and by the twilight of Wednesday morning it had gone. It took the news stations an hour to figure out aliens snatched all the city’s sanitation workers. Over the months, the garbage piled up. Twenty bags on the curb became forty, then a hundred, and so on. I don’t know the predispositions of other intelligent species, but humans generally solve problems with band-aids, producing worse problems. We created filth levees. For a year we moved around giant heaps. Mountains of trash tunnels. Straddled one square foot of concrete on the sidewalk. Entrepreneurs capitalized. Oxygen mask hoodies. An electric cane with a built-in zapper for roaches. Steel-toed boots were all the rage. Mayoral elections hinged on promises of cleanliness. It would be fifty-two years before they came back. Now, they wanted bankers. Pundits hypothesized they were giving capitalism a go late in their advancement. Finally, we cleaned up the city with government subsidized drones. Universal basic income was a hit. Most job-jobs were recreational activities by post-scarcity 2072. We didn’t have many bankers left. I personally counted thirty-two whirling up into the midnight. That’s when I realized everyone dies, progress isn’t linear, and to enjoy the little things. Clean sidewalks, a daydream in the park, a slice of fresh watermelon.

545 Light-Years from the Sun

A name my name

is a cloak draping introductions

quilting a conversation

this seems small

but for a long while

my name was a stutter

a hesitating

reminder

a volute

spiraling back to the blacktop

where kids declared my identity

based on a word

I didn’t pick

then one twilight moment

my shadow found me

and wrapped me in a constellation

a fabric pried from the sky

I became a ship’s compass

I hung on the horizon

ablaze for eons

timeless in meaning

this is what my father hoped

when he named me after a star

S.S. Mandani runs Saltwater Coffee in the East & West Village of NYC. He studied fiction at The University of Florida and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His stories appear in Shenandoah, Passages North, Hobart After Dark, X-R-A-Y, Longleaf Review, 3:AM, and twenty other wonderful venues. He has been recognized by the Kenyon Review, Martha’s Vineyard Institute, and Periplus Collective writing communities, and will serve as a Bread Loaf Administrative Scholar in 2022. In 2021, he was nominated for Best of the Net (Nurture), Best Microfiction (No Contact), and Best Small Fictions (Lost Balloon) and, in 2022, he made the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. A locally famed macaroni & cheese joint, S'MAC, in the East Village is currently handing out 10,000 copies of two of his flash fictions on an orange foldout to hangry New Yorkers. His novel-in-progress explores a generational family of jinn. He writes about drinks and culture as a columnist for Liquid Carriage at No Contact. | @SuhailMandani