I’d rather be a poet saint and write devotional hymns all day

When Ammaiyar begged Shiva to release her from her beauty, and all worldly burdens, I was exhausted by my surrender to the man who hailed me on the street, and I was exhausted by my dominion over the hairs on my bathroom floor. Give me total power or give me none at all. I think you have me confused for a girl when, actually, I’m the pupil in your eye: I do whatever the light tells me to. You accept the world like a mold receives its plaster, forgetting I’ve nearly obliterated myself, just to flail around in empty space. It’s exhausting to remember I’ll never ever be free, I can’t even disappear, I can’t even fill up the earth, when the distance to either pole is the length of a cosmic universe.

I’m cold

It’s scary that I could have been born
a krill, a tree, a whale
I don’t want to be a part of the world
the way my eye is a part of my face—
that is, unable to see itself.

I don’t know how to say this, but
I love my life like a stump
and death is a saw, a line of red dots
they swim across my pupils, the serrated
edge, before it rips me clean.

Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. She thinks poetry is too good for her but makes her best attempts in the dark.