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Scroll down for more poems.
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 Salil Chaturvedi
Issue no 25
Sure enough
four petals a touch of orange in the stem
knee-high
That’s Farsetia.
This is the only place you will find it
On top of a hill, green in August
A short-lived trick
Then, a return to bare and rocky.
By Ritoshree Chatterjee
Issue no 25
maman, i died by the shore tonight.
the sea wept a soft lavender afterthought
and sand snuck in my heart till
a peanut-seller’s pockets spilled out the evening
maman, i died by the shore tonight
the waves lapped up my little girl’s body
By Sabah Al-Ahmed
Issue no 25
1989 –
Emperor Jehangir’s awestruck lines
from a houseboat on Dal lake
had now started to melt,
‘Gar Firdaus ruhe zamin ast,
hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin ast’
It wasn’t the paradise on earth,
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.