A Legacy Poem by Prageeta Sharma

All this noisy commotion isolated a fairly
small universe of nothing special.
I had faced the assistant to the incumbent,
his failed face of poetry bottomless
with self-pride and a satisfaction that fed his wolf.
And he was a wolf
and when I scoffed at him
with some penetration I could see the clamor
of his wounds but also the vanity
in his recognitions. He believed I was undeserving
and thought it his right to judge, and his
judgment, a stun gun, took
my gender and race and euthanized
its center, and he thought this
was an extension of the occult,
that it was the intuition
of a bright star
affecting forward.
I wanted him to see this in a particular
light but the particular worsened into
a bruise of matter far more inhumane,
and I fell into its hole and he, with his glee,
had no idea, because his gender and race
gave him the privilege to look down
and see how my skeleton warped my will
but not the firmament of my broadness,
and what I know now as measuring across
power and enduring many luminary deficits
that come out of symptoms and their fallen edges.