The mouth of a wound is a memory by N Sehar
18th August 1990's.
17:29 and the prime studio
publishes news of the internal
collapse- the Soviet Union.
A boy fourteen
kilometres away is born
again- a refugee.
The headlines list down
five reasons for it; specific
ones for disintegration
and the boy takes it all,
snorts and presses
it against the leather skin
-trauma.
Torn suitcases
makes for small
funeral events.
The fallen birds' corpses
on the farms, nestling-
chirps make for a good melody.
The pumpkins to harvest,
the burner yet to be cleaned.
Football net, Franks's diary.
The last words of Zelda-
a scene frozen,
a father dying,
the landscape,
Its texture-
a familiar ache.
The shape of the hands,
footstep and body-
the symmetry of leaving.
And along with it a wound;
and the mouth of it-
a memory.
24 February 2022.
A breeze hustles its way
through a man's hair-
Kalbaisakhi
settled near the Bay of Bengal.
The man,
portraiture of
built bricks
out of things broken,
cracked,
adapting culture
and nuances and
its food habit.
Carrying similar
a legacy-
of a man
before him,
a man
before him;
the ancestors-
the dead elegies
of the liberation war,
semblance of the
poetic arc, the ugliness of
dislocation.
Broad chin, five and a half
inch tall,
reads three different
newspapers-
two in the language
of the Sahib's
forgotten, the state
and other
one in regional
preserving the essence of
each; it's gaucheness.
The Hindu,
Deccan Chronicle,
Akhbar-e-Mashriq.
Burnt houses
and
quality of seeds,
hate speeches,
Manto, Kaminsky-
his love poems,
Russia's invasion
of Ukraine,
The past buried
in the backyard
and the corridor
reaping the fruit.
The mainstream media
discourse,
the prime time
news of the fleeing republic-
disdained, almost sliced neat;
a Ukrainian boy raging towards
borders-
a wound similar with
its mouth head tilted, falling
wide open near the mouth.
And another wound
steadily crawls its way above
the man,
initiates to
spreads its skin
on him reading,
bulging head-
cracked open easily.
Known landscape.
A forbidden territory
and a language solely bitter.
Resembling an ache-
recognised,
a known mother tongue;
Its texture.
A memory.
With a face,
a face strikingly familiar-
of a man before him,
a man before him.
Explosive Explorations of a Rogue Human by Mayukh Dutta
This restless city has been silent lately
Offering only alms to the dying, sleeping with dogs and death
However deep I might explore its roads
Hunger unites across homes, across the streets in an abyss of chaos.
Wherever I go, this release of unchained chaos takes over
Darkness in a cave where sound is an anomaly,
Like the universe where light is but isn't all
The screams of breathlessness unite the same, like voids in solid spaces -
Metaphors of sufferings in institutionalized existence.
I go to places with bustling activity
And I see the evenings of red skies
Like blood-stained clothes of slit throats
Blades of social conflicts slicing the other
In a lover's abode, the murderers reside.
These leave imprints on my shadowed skin
The cities and towns, where sufferings are alike
The heavy metallic chatter of bombarded urban centres
Often shrinking convictions like flies devouring fallen crumbs of sweets.
I remember my hometown as a port, a temporal existence in a temporary space
I remember the fields of paddy as a picture, a monochromatic masterpiece singing melodies of the plain painters involved,
I remember the monuments as dead members of a family, unremembered picture frames with generations growing up around
I remember the cities as centres of hope, where lives often collide with meteors of dust, ashes being the outcome.
These memories are parts of me:
My cells remembering every step taken in a foreign territory
And I, a part of these metaphors
For uniting with 'real' places and 'hiding' people often come with a tasteful thirst for blood,
Feeding on brokenness while romanticising the bitterness in catastrophic events of human sufferings
Transforming me into an animal, olfactory triggers remembering the scent of misery, of agony, of torment.
Therefore, wherever I go
Becomes a part of me, involuntarily.
And so I decide,
Begone are the trusted contracts signed with boundaries
Fallen are the walls of hesitant encounters with infant ideas
The accidents shall remain
The clashes shall continue
I shall be uprooted
I shall be reborn.
Lonely hands by Kanishka Shankar
the street flower vendors in my city have melancholy written in the creases of their palms
from 8 a.m. they sell stories and fresh flowers that leave their fragrance in cramped lanes and empty tourist bus seats
every evening, i stop to get gajra from a new place
the lady i bought gajra from today wrapped it in a newspaper that had a headline of workers injured due to the collapse of an under-construction building
her sharbati green bangles curved into a frail shade of hope and her paan stained smile didn’t falter as she handed over a piece of her heart to me like I was her own
tonight, i carry more than just the scent of gajras home.
the thing about lonely hands is
they leave stains on people you love
and for them to long for you in your presence
so that you never schedule I miss you’s for tomorrow
while you gently look at my hands knowingly,
i rip contemplation off my tongue
like a bandaid off a fresh wound
only this once, the ripping sounds like a roaring confession
it’s urgent, so much that it starts to spill over
but i patiently wait letting the pleas fluidly make themselves known to you
for there’s no holding back now.
wherever I go becomes a part of me somehow
i am running into closed spaces and sardonic poems
so often, that I start to become one myself
a prayer in the abandoned church I took shelter in,
the vendor whose resentment towards fate stained me
and a flower tucked behind your hair when you were the happiest
today the clouds carry school bags filled with heavy grays
the static between our bodies is declared dead on arrival
yet we crawl into our unmade bed to make mundane love
counting the little freckles on your nose and memorizing a grocery list for our famishing hearts.