My love for small towns Doesn’t stop with those coconut trees Waving at me from Guwahati. I venture deeper into Nalbari. Nagarbera and Jakhalabandha pass by me. I haven’t seen them since childhood Those destinations of memory. Some towns I have met only once Others not in this life. This passion for old is nothing new But I bring to this quest A feeling I did not know before. Morigaon, so near Nagaon, where the milk farms are After you cross the nursery with flower po

It’s a dust-choked sky A silence sharp like a knife Where broken stones litter And the innocent children Play on the bloodstained streets Oblivious of the suffocating air. My heart goes out To Gaza's streets Where tears flow freely I hear the echo Of blasting mortar shells And a distant sobbing cry. I see a dream dissolved In the troubled water And the shadow Of a life in darkness A future doomed Forever A story growing old Day by day. For every mother Holding her tears For e

I must be on my third try Of wordle When the screen beeps, and I see you in your familiar blue jacket The smile hasn’t changed Though the once fuller face seems leaner Even in your twenties, the acne keeps returning So I can give you tips to apply the yogurt-turmeric paste I almost shriek as you knowingly zap one of zits with a tinkling laughter This, this ritual eases us into a familiarity My eyes light up with a memory of those high school days When hygiene was a relic And

Dusk waits on the margins of the dying day to slowly scroll mellow light, dimming the dusty harshness; ushers in trees and the sudden babble of birds streaming down like a thousand waterfalls falling from the sky; a babble drowned by the honk of traffic returning home to nest uncertainly. A pause in the day's dusty harshness and the creeping restlessness of night. The mellow ache of a dim memory, fading to a glow worm searching, searching.... for a mate for itself in light ne

I looked out the window where the sky and the ocean met between them there lay a horizontal line-- Kshitij, you, the horizon, and I, the suspended marginal line trying to reach you, but my songs are drowned in the ripples of the ocean. The page of the leather-bound journal stared at me with your immaculate calligraphic message: To my love, my friend, my wife who has given me thirty-five years of cherished memories – may we have many more… for a long time, those words st

The bitter, twisted lies of history, Can't annihilate her valourous sacrifice: Against a cruel Brahminic patriarchy A subaltern spoke in action amplified! Visceral waves of loss and sorrow For the Avarna woman denied justice, Surge within and soon overflow-- Oh, crushed was the blossom full of promise! Yet her soul invictus seeking honour Makes her an incarnation of valour. The feudal days soaked in barbarism: Lower caste women suffering public shame-- Forced to move withou

That jarring, incoherent lilt of hollowness— The lanterns hung on those hollow beams, The bamboos that held the tent at the oasis, The sparkling sand grains spread over miles, The barren expanse dotted with cacti, Uninhabited wasteland, sans life. Hollowness, caught in a deadly snare, Vacuum echoed with melancholic air. The rib cage held a bloodied stone, Unaffected by human pain. Flimsy enough to fear the wrath, Succumbed to the drying spell, Unknown to the geography of hung

It never heals, On some days a mere bruise, On others a gaping hole; Rife under an unwitting scab; Chipping at the edges that clumped mass. A slow rogue erythrocyte emerges to bathe in serum again! Ah soon a wound - what maggot wouldn’t desist! Nah no bandage, one wouldn’t need one, or would they? Do they know? Would they ever know if they stained years? On some days all that remains is a scar for the watchful eye, The observant ones, the prying ones, the ones that thrive on

Who am I, what am I — I owe you no confession. You bit, I flinched; you played, I screamed; you roared; I wavered — but never truly fell. You... who are you? You, whom I once called my solace, my harbinger, the very marrow of my existence — the one I mistook for my identity. I was unfettered, yet I walked into the silken snare of your affection. I told you plainly — I am boundless — and you smiled and said, "So you are free", Then the clouds grew luminous, the birdsong turned

My body is not broken— it is a country with languages yet to be named, an atlas of nerves that bends in unfamiliar syntax. You touch it with maps made of myth, assume the terrain from stories told by those who never asked for directions. You call me other as though difference were a sin, as though the moon’s dark side did not hold oceans in its silence. I do not walk—I navigate, not through absence, but through a world that built its doors too narrow, its stairs too ste

Drag the crayon, watch it break. Pick it up, break it again. Breaking the crayon is making the break From reality that you seek. Dreams of reality in sleep. But the crayon keeps breaking. Will all my crayons break? What happens when all my crayons break? Will I have to start all over again? Will you keep my coloured lines up here on this wall? Or does the city need it for some other purpose? Forget I was here, I don't want the attention. My crayon breaks. Please buy me new

Everything has a scar look at the moon, its calm stitched with unspoken wounds. Each crack carries delight, for that is where the light finds a home. I trace my own fractures, not to mourn them but to understand how survival glows. Hope arrives softly, not as triumph, but as a trembling hand that refuses to let go. Even in darkness, I will find a way for the broken shine differently I Roopal, am a Research Scholar at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, Un

They dressed me in pronouns, and called it a truth. I wore them until my skin tore. The mirror applauded but the flesh refuses to perform. Inside me, a revolution whispers, not loud, not safe – but alive. I am both a wound and a weapon Each scar a sentence. Each breath a rebellion against revolution. Dr. Neha Nagar, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Maharaja Bijli Pasi Government P.G College, Ashiana Lucknow Email- nagar526@gmail.com

In this digital era the digitalized emotions change with the hands running on the keyboard. Emojis, often in a row, that defy the science of hermeneutics Abbreviated messages that are as short as the short-lived feelings they intend to convey. The pictures on the screen upload desire, which the inbox messages multiply Sometimes she may bare her soul along with her body Who can dispute Donne that ‘pure lovers’ souls descend to the senses else ‘a great prince in prison lies’? T

Where memories do not keep, where tunes are confused, how do you serenade your beloved? How do you sing open skies and soaring wings, when all you see are walls? The walls grow in your cells, till blinkered, you trot on the straight and narrow. The tonga driver raises his whip and lashes. The horse neighs in pain but still obeys. Mitali Chakravarty has three books of poems: Flight of the Angsana Oriole (Hawakal, India, 2023) and Cities, Nomads and Rocks (Gibbon Moon, UK, 2024

She’s beautiful. But he hasn’t seen her beauty. He never will. She sings well. And that he hears. The heavy monsoon rain has soaked their clothes. They are together begging on the train. She’s singing a song He’s playing refrain. Some things are hard. Some things as togetherness as here beyond momentary ecstasy that the sighted keep looking for everywhere. their entire life and never find, all that beauty is here, where the quiet finger-birds in the nest of their closely held

I am Gaia, your Mother Earth My greens golds, blues, pure chroma Sustain your bewildered life Your darkness throttles me Your jigsaws pierce me Will you never end this strife? I birthed you as you bloomed I wrapped you in my lovelorn folds You breathed in my watery placenta You danced along my ripples You lived cosily in my moulds You ate, drank, slept, rose in songs All in my silken wreathed sheath In my shimmering grassy gold --- You flew from azure to ether Rejuvenate

I am here! I am here! You don’t seem to listen? You don’t see what I wear! You don’t see me? I am here! On my way, I met a shivering stick. Frailty marshalled in an old rebel. On my way, I met a blind wheelchair. I saw more blindness around it. On my way, the conch shell waved in my ears… Those waves travelled through my throat, my chest, to my stomach. You don’t see me? You don’t hear me? Forgive my audacity! But, I want to ask… My thin voice lingers and disappears into the

Identities in a mirage And the identity, to identities changing the guards. Bartering self to others, feinding messages erupt yet in wane, as the target set, all set. Yes. Time controls and commands circles, moves and pints. Whom to see? Yet it does from the tail to the mouth. Yes, it does so, and so on. The identities in a mirage doting, cooing, finding and ogling in a chain; the fissures and craters the loop and the chain the vision, the revision and a silence that sust

Leaves fallen beneath a tree, crimson, ochre, brown, dimpled by dusk. In windless air one rolls gently away another follows, another, yet another like butterflies I once pressed into pages; their colours gone, smudges of the past. Bookmarks dead, yet alive. I had chased one to a rose, crimson on red. Gripped it hard; yellow dust flecked my nails. Let go. It tottered, flew in zigzag lines dropped on dewy grass as if drunk. One good wing opening closing another torn, its yellow