Hello, Brother (A reflection of Zubair Ahmed’s poem of the same name) Sometimes during quiet summer afternoons when everyone is asleep, I sit at your desk. They took away your half of the bunk-bed anyway. Aai still calls your name in our empty house and Papa sits very still. I think he pretends not to […]
Living a dog’s life On the day of Divasi amavasya, Amma breaks a thumri on the transistor, fetches some fresh mud near the tulsi plant with a girl child’s innocence. She makes two idols — Shiva and Parvati — faceless, crude, even genderless. She empties a bowl of coconut oil on my head, saying that […]
“All day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.” – Pablo Neruda *** How easy it is to slip out of each other’s texts, playlists and event horizons. Watch a ship fall off the geodesic surface pinned down with the dreams and spittle of a billion-fold, parasitic species; watch the seas swell up […]
(To preserve the format of the poems, we have made them available in a PDF document. Please click here to access.)
Pressing knees to living earth, prostrating, you may see them: cicada shells, molted skins, amber brown and wisp-fragile as if the air shaped their angles, as clouds are sculpted in the wind.
Night breaks apart like pomegranate seeds in my palm. The juice is everywhere, but who can see things when they spill? There’s only the smell and the incense of the heart vomiting into the night. The night has been cut short, the dream severed. The dream like an octopus chewing the naked sense of being. […]