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...
True Self
Nameless stands with his back to the wall.
Desperate grappling of an unsettled mind.
Piercing screams emitting from some lost place.
Unsure of any fate, real or imagined.
Looking past a vague blackness,
slowly filling an empty jar on the shelf.
Cardboard dreams crumbling,
while paint peels off in layers of obscurity.
A disease of doubt...
Not Garden-Variety
In dirge of desires
fear transacts with
hedge of hesitancy
to keep pace
with striptease
of tides. Come-on
by tits or tattoo
on hineys stir
intuitively.
Primer of pomology
has other clauses
some read
some unread.
Fruition
isn’t for everyone.
Prescription
Towels loll in the sun after mopping
wet bodies, you and I wipe each other
with our skins in lambency in another
episode of linkages. Equipping...
I PASS YOU AN EMPTY SKY
I just
love when
I pass you
an empty
sky
and you
spin it
then
hand me
back
a fistful
of stars.
ENTANGLEMENT 1
You reach through
this spiral of settling light
and touch
a drifting,
mislaid piece
of dust.
You lift it
and somewhere else
in time and space,
something in me
rises.
ENTANGLEMENT 2
On this ground I plant
a seed.
I lay by this mound
of peat moss and...
“The maker has no control. This is sortilege, the magic of inditing.”
Hello Sanjeevji! It’s a pleasure to be interviewing you. Let me tell you, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Nine Summers Later, and This Summer and That Summer, your latest release. I’ve also read a bunch of your newer poems among...
Sandalwood
Some foundation, concealer
a little rouge
a subtle lipstick
her reflection disappoints
lines, hard earned, unwanted
her reflection smiles
it helps
She dusts and tidies
arranges
rearranges
old photographs
of ghosts
She lights a candle
sandalwood
she vacuums
and sweeps
she polishes
and primps
her home
herself
just in case
Two Scientists
I should be in work
instead, I sit in a Dublin café
tightly clutching a cup of tea
as if it might...
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...
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,...
Kiriti Sengupta
I forget the poems I write. I don’t blame memory. Thanks to the two molar teeth I lost in spite of being a dental surgeon. They were badly broken. I had excruciating pain and did not listen to the consultant who had advised Root Canal Therapy. I wanted...
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...
Nikita Parik
Caked in mud
caged in faith
prayers keep me alive
108 names but
I recognize none
(“Devi 2.0”)
The binaries of personal and public must be subverted when seemingly personal concerns voiced through personal expressions transcend to achieve a universality of sorts. In her debut poetry book, Apostrophe, Barnali Ray Shukla’s versification of seemingly...
Checkmate
This is how it rains.
A cloudburst
when you laugh and compete
with the spattering droplets
and I
harvest a silence
in a pair of pretentious shades
tears have long muted
consoled and labelled.
Everything has a cure
but no one knows or recalls
what heals first
pain or time?
We possess disintegrated memories
petals, showers, ice pellets, leaves, dust, debris, gust, silence
scattered
in...