Did You Know?
RTs are not endorsements
Dinosaurs are not ballerinas
Words shapeshift as they please
Promises are not forged of steel
April is not the cruellest month
Eliot got it wrong, ask January
if you don’t believe me
or December, deep and dark.
The witches were not
looking to make trouble
Macbeth was hungry
He had murder on his mind
Sometimes one plus one
Doesn’t add up to two
Depends on who is counting
Depends on whose data it is
Democracies can be autocracies
Dictators wear smart disguises
Just because votes are cast
Just because elections are held
Freedom is not a given
Elections are not guardrails
Democracy can be shot dead
as polling booths fill up
And the firing squad takes aim
singing the nation’s praises.
Vineetha Mokkil is the author of the short story collection A Happy Place and other stories (HarperCollins). Her fiction has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Fictive Dream, The Bombay Review, Asian Cha, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Journal and in The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Kitaab, Singapore) and the Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing (Niyogi Books, Delhi). She was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and was a nominee for Best Small Fictions 2019.