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You are here: Home / 48 / Homo Accidens

Homo Accidens

48, Poetry by Supritha Rajan

          What
is the difference
                    my son asks (water rivering

          across the table) between
mistake (water pooling
                    on the mottled landscape

          of our tiles) and
accident? I am
                    squatting on the floor, cloth

          in hand, while he
traces—with the same
                    hand that moments ago hung

          mid-air
like the fleshed signal
                    of fault (I didn’t mean to do it, I

          didn’t see it
there)—hidden figures
                    in the smooth stone: pterodactyl,

          pterosaur, pteranodon—
some version of which
                    in rock or sediment once was found.

          Death by impact.
Death by gas.
                    The difference I say, looking out

          over the sink
into intervening trees
                    and rain, is knowledge and intent

          versus (is this
even right?) something
                    that happens by chance.

          The rain falls
in large, silver coins
                    that globe the earth. You might

          read
in every shattered
                    drop that scripts the lawn the price

          (And what
does intent mean?)
                    of freedom or the suddenly illumined

          secret
a finger blindly points to
                    in an opened book—prophecy

          a kind of knowledge you
happen upon
                    by luck other hands designed. Plot,

          said Aristotle,
who knew a thing or two
                    about the aleatory, is the arrangement

          of the incidents—
the datum of a life given
                    in action, the account of which we call

          story. It means
doing something
                    on purpose like lolling on the floor

          instead of
helping me clean. When
                    my mother tells stories she feeds them

          in one mouthful—
pruned of ornament
                    and bereft of counterfactual. The distance

          from incident
to consequence
                    one swallow, whether ending in tears

          or joy. Where
does something begin
                    and where does it end? Now there’s

                    a mystery
no story unspools.
                    Just ask the common house sparrow

          —our domestic theropod
channeling the air
                    as it leaves our empty feeder—

          living proof
that even death
                    is action without end.


Supritha Rajan is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize (2007) and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have been published in Conjunctions (online), New England Review, Washington Square Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.

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Call for Submissions

Call for submissions for issue #51, as well as our poetry and micro essay contests. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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