The Friday Poem: ‘Ophiocordyceps unilateralis’ by Rushi Vyas
(Image: DeAgostini/Getty Images)
A new poem by Dunedin poet Rushi Vyas.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
Blood remembers. The infection starts
with an innocent fungal cell. A word.
The word replicates, acts as a proto-molecule,
interlocks with offspring, builds walls,
carves tubes. The cell culture echoes. The city limits
shake. The colonized ant feels a ghost possess
their muscles, walk them away from those they love
toward a depression at the leaf’s underbelly.
Laugh it off. The ant hardens their exoskeleton.
Sharpens the mandible too. History overwhelms.
Parasites hold the whip. The infection begins
with one. Just a word. Then the word protrudes
as a purple stalk through the skull, a crowning
ornament for the body made instrument
by another’s want. What follows is inevitable
as snow. The colonized transmogrifies, the shell
erupts. The spores fall on the colony below.
Do not name death winter. Do not say a word.
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are welcome and will be open until 31 July 2022. Please send up to three poems in a Word or PDF document to chris@christse.co.nz.
Rushi Vyas
Rushi Vyas is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection When I Reach For Your Pulse (Four Way Books, 2023) and the collaborative chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint with Rajiv Mohabir (Gasher, 2021). Born and raised in Ohio, Rushi lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago and a facilitator for the Ōtepoti Writers Lab. Rushi's poems can be found online and in print in A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021), The Georgia Review, Adroit Journal, Tin House, The Offing, Pigeon Pages, Landfall, and elsewhere.
