No Change Of Address Poem by Mandira Mitra

If canned mackerel in sauce
Had some semblance to memory
Would they recall
A once buoyant limpid world
Bedded with limestone and flagella
Wooed by green iridescent sea weed
Skirting past flame coloured coral
Magellanic Cloud of the Ocean
Like I recall my world
Perched atop this jerry can,
Home to fifteen megatons of nuclear warhead,
Called earth
And doing my own belly dance
Upon discovering another
Twenty light years away jerry can—
Let it be heard and noted
Sealed and signed, I,
Prefer to die, pleasantly
With my mother’s face in my dead fish eye
Than, to sit alone on a fifty degree afternoon
Humid enough to make one swoon,
Opening my radiation proof can
Of mackerel in oil of bran.