Modern Mythologies

by Sandra Kasturi

This poem won People's Choice in the 2015 2-Day Poem Contest

Now let us tell each other many myths

in this modern era, this plaguy drag of years

marching ever toward the slow heat-death

of the unspiralling universe—

We will tell each other fables of lost appliances:

of the oven that baked one’s sorrow into

hard cakes to last the winter through,

of the chest freezer fat as a resurrected Easter

ham, stuffed full of tupperwared affection.

It was different before, when prayers went

unanswered except by unruly mechanical gods,

bent on destruction and deconstruction,

on the betterment of board games,

and the declination of satellite technology.

Then we were ourselves.

Now we are as bitter as someone who had faked

the moon landings, only to find out that no one

believed in the moon in the first place.

We are full of sugared treats, sticky

with carnival disappointment and bitter

as mud, as prospectors back from the general store

still carrying their sacks of iron pyrite.

We are lapsed worshippers of the natural disaster

of our selves, grasping for the unruly deities

of our fleshy pasts, soaking in the rays of a disappointed

sun, mirrored in the hidden face of the liquid future,

our lives an empty stencil held against a greying sky.

Published online July 01 2015.