May 16, 2011By Sumana Roy And all I see now is my face through a curtain: a pebbled pock-marked past, its burning by-lanes, and drop by drop, like a leaking sewer, his love, pungent, corrosive, windblown. And all I’ll see now is my unborn child learning the alphabet and its vitriolic histories: H for He, H for Hate, H […] April 22, 2011By Urvashi Bahuguna She’s a study. A truncated, Curving, Elusive Prometheus With the moment, this very one, As her rock. She’s a tangent, if you will. She extends Over the planes; A circle within a circle, Submerging The curling, straining ends Of the magnetized tracks. She’s a limit, if you will. She Pulls a weight, one with […] October 22, 2010By Anita Sivakumaran My Never Naked Mother I There are such things to a child As there is the virgin birth to a Christian. My mother, I always imagined, Never took her clothes off. For sex she merely lifted up The skirts of her sari, the fold Upon fold and exposed Blameless legs, fuzzy in my Imagining […] September 23, 2010By Namita Krishnamurthy nola three floors above the street, Nola sits naked on a bench with winter that coos into her ears like rain he mixes colours, a tinge of blush in his cheeks, to paint poinsettias – I can only write of the artist whispering nothing but conscience into the brush but Nola will still sit […] August 26, 2010By Divya Rajan Your scarf spoke nine tongues. I failed to know the purpose, seek the language of splinters, shards, lazy salsas. I thought the skies bowed to you even as they turned mauve. Awe filled my lungs, I breathed. Shards slow danced, I felt your smile. It smelt of something else. Your ducking shadows traded with […] August 04, 2010By Sumana Roy He always snips off ends. My tranquil ends, fins deep asleep. Hair is frond. Hair is leech. Hair is auction. Hair is lintel. Hair is traffic, sigh, umbrella butt. Gaya, Kashi, Vrindavan. Coconut-flesh scalps, a manifesto. “Boy’s cut.” He always snips off ends. Antennae of lust, tendrils of moist defeat. Hair is vial. […] May 12, 2010By Trisha Bora The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz Tonight, there’s been a burial. A careless hammering of nails into a dry casket – by men drunk on moonshine – breaks the night, scattering the weevils and owls into the rising moon. They’ve taken my words, my amour, my knife and left me here to fill the […] February 18, 2010By June Nandy Woman Made always the same shop of decency from where my books and dresses are bought. my nationality is decided by the identity i hold between my legs. i have no Pandora’s Box in whose depth, i can store my fantasies. it comes swimming to me, his battle ground; bringing me currencies, carnal, banal. […] January 19, 2010By Janice Pariat Bertha & I Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason with a fire and sadness in my soul. I pace my room – this attic of madness – it keeps me sane. I think it keeps me whole, somehow. There’s no breeze through the window, just an empty vastness of night and shadow and half-lights. […] January 01, 2010By Susan Kiguli Mothers Sing a Lullaby (after the 1994 Rwandan genocide) Mothers sing a lullaby As the dark descends on trees Shutting out shadows. The sensuous voices swish and swirl Around shrubs and overgrown grass Hiding mountains of decapitated dead And the glint of machetes That slashed shrieking throats. In these camps without happiness Mothers […] |
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