POETRY

Kinds of Boys

By Debmalya Bandyopadhyay     VOLUME 58 No. 4

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Sheep boys rear each other’s sleepy clouds.
You can’t see them from this far, dandruff

dotted on a drench of smashed-pear green.
They comb and worship the Earth’s hairy back,

and somewhere afar, a dog boy is digging into mud’s dictionary
trying to find a word for bone. A collar on his neck, the tight O

of Obedience, a map of violence branded against his skin. Boys wearing
their marks and yet breaking into smiles are my favorite kind of boys.

Like bee boys who know their role in the hierarchy, who labor
and straighten themselves into submission. Night casts its sheet

over twilight’s tender mattress. Boys raise their flanks from rest
and hear the bells pealing in their cathedrals. Boy panther, flushed

with temptation, aims his fasting vehicle toward appetite. All stealth
and sub-grass. Blunder shuts the gap between him and unsuspecting

boy hog—led a little too alone into proscription. Not fear, not regret,
but the prairie moon vibrates in the droplets of his eyes. A boy band of

fireflies are pinpricks that puncture this ill-tempered scene. Hunger buzzes
and stretches each boy-belly like bamboo bone. Dull boys dawdle the dark

in schoolboy huddles for long after a kill, wear their scent with unboyish fear.
A mob of coyote boys encircles every flame. Nothing burns them out entirely,

having witnessed death still innocent and early. I watch each boy flex
his attaboy muscles at something so vast that it dismantles his body’s

constitution. How each boy, buoyed by his needs, answers his desire:
those boy bells chimed from a churchyard consumed entirely by fire.


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DEBMALYA BANDYOPADHYAY (he / him) is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is part of the 2025 cohort of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. He was the runner-up of the UK National Poetry Coaches Slam 2025 and a finalist for the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, Grouse Grind Lit Prize, Osmosis Poetry Prize, Sweet Lit’s Poetry Prize, and the Briefly Write Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, wildness, Chestnut Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is often found in parks confabulating with local birds.


VOLUME 58 No. 4