The houses protrude from the hills like buck teeth. But this is no mouth. It’s like Siliguri’s rolled-up sleeve. Pink, yellow, anaemic blue – the houses, the molars. They’re like leaves, competing for light. I notice their stillness, how they never shiver from the cold. The windows rattle, I know, though I can’t hear them [...]
(To listen to the poet read the poem, click here.) * We ken we’ve said aw this afore But, please, lend us yer ear fur a minute. Aye, we’re jist a wee country, But we’re a wee country wi a big hert, An when Thomas Hamilton Stormed intae a schuil gym An shot dead 16 [...]
(1) our first phone was born with me, my mother always said; my first memory of distance also comes from the phone. my father, on a Friday, calls home and tells me, “I cannot come this Saturday.” I am two. He is thirty nine. What about Sunday? “Not Sunday either, darling. I will come next [...]
I like country churches While chicken play around in the porch, on the steps sit little girls, passing their time picking lice And almost always locked are those sacred chambers in the holy presence of drying bloody red chilies Indolently swayed across the front, dried palm crosses Resident in roof tiles are vagabond squirrels The [...]
To play a sound recording of the poem (recommended), click here. * Over a cup of chaha, I stumbled over words through a conversation in a Marathi influenced by the American tongue. My relatives and friends listened their faces falling and at that moment in that conversation the distance between us was much further than [...]
When the phone doesn’t stop ringing, I excuse myself from the meeting room; watch the rain create a rhythm that fails to touch me beyond the sound-proof glass I have collected two seasons since the last time you called the tremble in your voice seeks familiarity Konnichiwa you say in an uneasy whisper language has [...]