Civil Guardsmen
From a field of grasses dried
by wind, two civil guardsmen stare
toward the sun for traffic
on the lonely road
they have been stationed to protect.
They are tall
against the burnt horizon,
still as the ground itself,
and one is the reflection of the other
as, side by side, they stand
in place. Should one
turn around,...
The Removal of Sin in a World Without Sin
Turning once again toward the sea,
strong arms move my head
to look at the land instead,
a desert landscape beige, bland
sand the monotonous menu
for my eyes that have seen it all before.
Defiant, I turn to feast on the wild water,
currents pushing the shore...
TRIATHLON
Jane was in Vancouver one day and she stood
at the window and saw a woman crawling out
of the sea. The woman started running really
fast on the beach until she reached a bicycle
and then she hopped on it and kept going.
“Wow!” Jane said, “I just saw the evolution
of mankind in...
Balasan
I’ve met the river before, but this is a new setting—
like meeting a parent in their office.
Bala—sand, san—stone:
a river baptised for spitting its monsoonal gifts,
like calling a girl Khushi, to bait happiness.
The mountains that fight the grease of dust
when we look at it from Matigara,
they are here now, my...
Anuparna Mukherjee
In the wake of #MeToo campaign that has taken the social media by storm, it is alarming but perhaps not surprising to see the sheer number of women who have come forward with their traumatic experiences. It is true that there is a large number who chose to...
RENDEZVOUS
poems no longer emerge
out of some verdant soil
like lilies reflexively
spreading their pink cheer
they don’t happen as they did
twisting out of a gnawing gut...
glow worms on the screen
shedding light in dark corners
words tapping themselves out
of their own accord
have lost their easy fluidity
stanched like blood from a wound
they want me to...
Linda Ashok
Do you have any guess for this deep seated aversion for the “spoken word” in general? Why literary critics and practitioners exclude the spoken word from the scope of their literary pursuit? When the paper wasn’t invented and writing was yet to become a norm on paper but...
Anthony Ilacqua
The soda burned my nose a little. I took half the bottle in one swallow anyway. “I want to see the glass blowers,” Jill said.
I pulled the soda bottle away from the face. “The air feels good here,” I said. The clouds over the ocean were rolling in...
CREATIVITY
Excogitate a rainbow,
The piebald mind breaks into,
A woolgathering without rains,
On furlough during emphasis,
Precipitation and tedium.
A breakthrough in a belfry,
Is not a quantum of peerless words.
A sockdolager of a man's oeuvre,
Is also a renaissance of mirages.
Scant advertency makes him think.
DEATH
Cessation is a penumbra of the foofaraw.
The patina of sandalwood is...
Deepayan Bhattacharjee
I hate the coffee they serve at Starbucks. But I like one of the baristas in our local shop. So I go to that terrible coffee shop almost every evening, stay there for two to three hours, read a little and study for a while and write some...
Distant Thunder
I. Monster Mash
My sister noticed first:
“You walk like an old lady.”
I was forty-six, but she was right.
I could not, would not, see.
One day on the beach in Hermosa,
walking along the shore,
I stopped and looked back.
The sea tried to hide the evidence
but I was too quick:
step slide, step slide,...
THE MAGIC OF STILLNESS AND THE CHAOTIC
Some people, lost souls,
caught in the absurdity of noise,
create magical stillness
out of the chaotic
outwitting comprehension.
Other lost souls,
caught in the absurdity of silence,
create the chaotic
out of magical stillness
sidestepping incomprehension.
I, confused by both noise and silence,
adoring absurdity yet not knowing
which is more magical
or comprehensible,
stillness or...