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Scroll down for more poems.
By Gordon Pires
The cotton of my shirt clings,
a heavy second skin
glued by the salt of a Goan afternoon.
In this heat, the mind is a dry well,
no plots,
no movement
By Salil Chaturvedi
A mother calls from a thousand miles
and tries to swallow her daughter whole through the earpiece of a phone.
Amidst the cacophony of frogs, her silence is borrowed
from the trees, as are the mauve flowers
that sprout regularly in her hair.
By Suneeta Peres da Costa
I wander in the dark among the rooms in my
father’s house, touching talismans for blessings
and luck. Graffiti of old wounds cover the walls;
the ceiling sags and there are places where the
limestone is pocked and shell-shocked. We are
on land but the water is rising.
By Salil Charturvedi
The man sleeps on the rim of the pavement, one hand under his ear, legs bent. This is the shaded part of the esplanade. Now and then, a few bright-yellow flowers from the adjoining Copperpod tree fall and settle around him. His legs are draped with a faded blue-checked lungi and his skin is slightly darker than the tree’s shadow.
By Ashwani Kumar
I hear Columbus is in the city —
a sailor of ocean blue,
spilling secrets of his adventures to storm-starved skies.
Bells ringing, angels singing at traffic lights.
Persian pomegranate seeds scattered along the streets,
each a crimson promise of seers and saints.
For Plath, For Love
By Mona Dash
Don’t
Let us then recite Plath’s poetry
Let us wear white bikinis and smile
up at the sky, blue in our hearts as in the heavens
Let us sing mad girl love songs and in its rhymes
By Ashwani Kumar
Are there such things as a forest of horses?
It must have been a Sunday Summer
when I travelled without any roadmaps in Oklahoma —
moving between childhood and adulthood.
Navigating me
through ghost Cherokee turnpikes,
my son wakes me to warm, golden-brown sunlight —
By Tino de Sa
Procession of One
Bleak, unlovely and unrepentant
for the many unspeakable sins of her arid past,
summer returns.
Without shame she uncovers the riverbed
with its harvest of pebbles,
too dry again for the melon seeds to root.
By Jessica Faleiro
During a routine consultation, the cardiac interventionist frowns at my father’s ECG reading. He’s immediately admitted into the ICU, where he’s restricted to seeing visitors for only thirty minutes, twice a day. The ICU security guard, Raj, allows me into the ward after visiting hours, when he realises that my father is in for a long haul. It occurs to me that he’s seen as many dead people wheeled out as live ones wheeled in.
By Gargi Guha
Rains,
Yet again,
Through a curtain of coconut fronds.
I know, I must forget plans
or try to be practical. Or nice.
For, this is a call