Sunday | Anandi Kar

It is Sunday again and
The doorbell rings
My boyfriend’s friends
Are a noisy bunch of mad lads
They reek of the ugly taste
Of emptied, plastic soda bottles,
Their brains are as tiny
As their cig-butts
Whose souls they despondently suck on.
Their know-it-all tone
(As they name drop
Chomsky, Godard, Foucault)
Reminds me of apes in a cage.
One of them particularly
Keeps on gazing at my bare toes.

Sometimes
They try to include me in conversations.
They ask me to name six Nirvana songs
And why the band-tee sits so baggily on me.
They ask me to justify my choice of
Carol Ann Duffy over Pablo Neruda.
I make small talk to them
But most often, I don’t.

I just walk out of the flat.
From the crumpled beer cans,
Drugs like aquarium rocks on the spill filled carpet.
With hasty goodbyes 
I get out
And catch him saying how the sex is great and all; 
I shut the door.

When I return to the flat,
The coffee has turned cold.
He has gone out with them.

I sit down,
Read some Duffy
and fall asleep.

It’s Sunday again
and
It is how
I love it.

Anandi Kar is currently pursuing Masters in English from Jadavpur University . She graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. She lives in Bardhaman, a small town in West Bengal, India. As a young poet, she has already drawn significant attention of readers and critics. Some of her poems have already been published in some prestigious journals like Indian Literature, Muse India and Scarlet Leaf Review.