Rita Mookerjee

Don't Trifle with Baboon Queens


​In my hate mail, I spot the words you fucking baboon which fascinates
me. What a specific primate to name. I guess monkey wasn’t enough or

maybe they couldn’t tell if I was black brown yellow red enough to earn
a more tried and true slur. I confuse them which only makes them angrier.

But that anger is nothing compared to female baboons who roll up in packs
of 50 and more. There is nothing more important to them than the matriline

and Ancient Egyptians called them sacred which is fitting for any such society
—so singular and unyielding and divine. In the Atlas Mountains, male baboons

battle for the approval of the ladies and they are only invited to stay if they act right.
When they don’t the ladies pull up and give a warning—stretching their faces long

to show off rows of serrated teeth. If a quick threat doesn’t work, they knuckle up
darting from cliff to cliff to deliver a wallop followed by a vampiric lunge for

the jugular. One young dude gets pinned down against the black shale. He shrieks
after, maybe from the bite or maybe just out of shame. Either way, this is a good lesson

and he really should shriek. Because the truth is that he might be the same as them
and maybe even kin, but one hungry evening, he might get cannibalized all the same.

Kyrielle with the Crown Jewels


​​At sea level the warship was a spectre. Luminous at one moment, eternity’s termination the next. She couldn't see the recording of it’s lines on the horizon, a white wake among waves. No towering.
 
 We’re all likely murderous. –she said--
 
The force slips through your mind. It arrives the moment you look down the barrel and know someone will not come back alive. You might cut and leave— you think. – But for a while, for a while what’s normally, plainly said, must stay inside. What stays inside is an attention to movement. A secret word thrashes. No one will get to it. No one will hear it. Not even you, though it bangs its knuckles against your skull.
 
 
You said it would hit me, the shoreline, the waves sheen. I no longer knew what was true. A cross-out Saturn, the waves, with their silvers and touchings.  One is made by thoughts and then in my thoughts I knew. I couldn't carry the space between the body and the memory of the body. The earth swam with you as you swam among the shadows.
 
 
The illusion of a sphere came to her, and with it, the splendour of repair which held within it a dark mineral, a carbon imprint. Her whole face turned slightly farther than in profile. Her eyes followed the speed of the pallid boat.
 
Once you and she were just two people walking into the clear night. You gaze into a dream of the street’s end. You stood in the meadow.
 
You stood before the equestrian-gray house where smoke’s pewter complexion softened the fence line. In her blouse you see her form in fire. This was her third death, where she drown in fire’s doorway. Your lungs witness fire’s stratum.  The house an anthem upon the crest of the iron-burnt harbor, a searchlight.
 
Even now she is gone, proven too late to speak. Her invisible country fills with signals.
 
You’d come to understand there would be no intercession. What acolytes remained were now orphaned.
 
You remember the veteran grass in which she lay, looking upward to the dark grains of hydrocarbon, Saturn’s sputtering rings.

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Rita Mookerjee (she/her) is the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Postdoctoral Fellow at DePaul University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Hobart Pulp, New Orleans Review, the Offing, and the Baltimore Review. She is a co-founder of Honey Literary and a Poetry Editor at Split Lip Magazine.