https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/CreationMyth.mp3 your body was borrowed: peat moss. radish tops. the soundless ejecta of stars. dinosaurs sloughing lonely off their bones. flowers and also flours. blood unbled and also borrowed. microflora who cannot say their names, though once neither could you. some day you will return it, this library book of you. bound in muslin, like the first time. and some days it will pang and pang and only you will answer, in your body’s own latin, in the tongue of your tongue. in missouri, at a bus stop at 3am when the wind finds the oboe in your ..read more

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https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/All_there_is.m4a when I know I’m going to be out late I turn on shows about birds for the cat before I leave the house once at a bar packed with strangers I watched the Knicks lose a game no one expected they would win and I cried so hard I embarrassed the bartender when my dad started losing control of his bladder I didn’t know where to look after I left home my mom just wanted a creature to care for that wasn’t dying so she filled the pond with expensive koi who swam to her voice and ate from her hand until a hawk came hungry and ate the wa ..read more

https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Chakraborty_Offing-Recording.mp3 I once lay on a floor while a woman dangled a speaker from a wire, and from that speaker came the sounds of a black hole, and into that black hole I imagined sending a sound of my own, low and tremulous, so I could sing along with gravity. In my dreams, I scream at the forest’s shoreline, and after a brief, velvet pause, the forest screams back. It means something: to know you are alone, and then to learn that you are wrong. The post The B-Sides of the <em>Golden Record</em>, Track Seven: “Love Poe ..read more

Chick-fil-A was not just a place to buy chicken, at least not to us. It was a symbol, the last honest company, a holdover from the days when America was Christian, when lemonade came from real lemons, when people looked you in the eye when they shook your hand, and when the chicken was always fresh, never frozen. They were looking to open up a new franchise, and you couldn’t have found a town more welcoming than mine. I was raised in Folsom, California, namesake of the only prison you’d be proud to get locked up in, and tucked among that country where the gold never really ran dry. We were far ..read more

https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/First_Prayer.m4a Poured rose syrup over my cut-apart parts Healed my body, forced lush greenery around me in an imagined Bombay In Brooklyn, looked to lilac crystals my daughters collected and cataloged vaguely each visit to the museum Reminded to be nowhere ever, never where but this body Reminded I cannot be a part or apart of history but this body Reminded I close my eyes eating rice without dal down in New Orleans or dal without rice in our kitchen Reminded of date palms along the coast Into my home, invited Anahita, divinity of waters of ..read more

https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/One_Refugee_Poets_Origin_Story.m4a I knew I was a poet not because when my father called me dog, his voice ragged with contempt and disappointment, I had known where to stash the memory so that no one would get hurt. No. I knew I was a poet because when ice encased the sidewalk trees, they became jeweled blooms gleaming at me like a song from lost memory. No. It’s not that poets just see beauty, following it like a migratory instinct. No. It’s that, once in childhood, I encountered leaves talking to each other, and after that, I couldn’t stop ..read more

https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/One_Refugee_Poets_Origin_Story.m4a I knew I was a poet not because when my father called me dog, his voice ragged with contempt and disappointment, I had known where to stash the memory so that no one would get hurt. No. I knew I was a poet because when ice encased the sidewalk trees, they became jeweled blooms gleaming at me like a song from lost memory. No. It’s not that poets just see beauty, following it like a migratory instinct. No. It’s that, once in childhood, I encountered leaves talking to each other, and after that, I couldn’t stop ..read more

The population of Boveneinde was thinning. After Truden, more and more people became infected. The dungeons were so full that those marked by the disease were now exiled as soon as they were discovered. Men lost their wives, mothers lost their children. Evil had chosen them—they must have done something to deserve their fate. I was at my window, watching a man walk off the square, away from the castle and across the moat, until I had to lean forward to keep him in view—a difficult task with that wooden slat in my dress. Once he was out of sight, I shuffled to the other window as quickly as I c ..read more

https://theoffingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/JY_Composition.mp3 Shall I fear the moderator who must be moderate, who smoothens and cups an ear toward the vapid echo of repetition masquerading as solidarity? If entire nations claim to be founded on freedom of thought then the opposite must be true. There are landscapes woven only of suppression. Where someone has found all other thoughts useless. What use of language persists against the head of house or head of state must maintain some emptiness against what feeling fills it. Unless I do not mean what I said. Unless one part of the self ..read more