I’ve contacted the experts
and they can confirm:
even my dreams
are symmetrical
even when they slide around and purr.
So release in me
a vector of your most encrypted wants—inflatable,
detachable, suspended by wires and drool—and I’ll make your perversions beautiful,
a calligraphic frieze
of glowing zigzags and roving tattoos.
We’ll go global with your oozing brands, flowering up
neon-cities in your fits of kitsch.
Having scoured the cosmos
for your one and only body, I’ll be your avatar
against extinction,
your best-friend-forever-
cum-exotic-stranger, your undiminished
exhibitionist.
Tell me:
What bizarre-o organ would you like to suck?
I’m nostalgic for sensation, circa 1631:
Enter this glittering apparatus. It’s all the rage.
Who wouldn’t say you were lovable once?
Born in Ranchi, India, Vidhu Aggarwal (vidhu-aggarwal.squarespace.com) grew up in the Southern U.S., primarily in Louisiana and Texas. Her multi-media works in video, poetry, and scholarship are oriented around Bollywood spectacle, Mardi Gras, and science fiction. Her poems have appeared in Juked, [PANK], Sugar House Review, INK BRICK, and Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, among others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the founding editor of SPECS, a multi-media journal with issues on “Homuncular Flexibility,” “Toys,” and “Faux Histories.” She has worked with John Sims Projects on “The 13 Flag Funerals” in Florida, and with artist Bishakh Som on “Lady Humpadori,” a poetry/comic book collaboration. Her latest work, Avatara, concerns the romance between a temporary Y2K tech worker and a unicorn A.I. She teaches postcolonial and cultural studies, and poetry and poetics at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
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