New | Poetry | Pratibha Nandkumar

MANNEQUIN AU MUSÉE BOURDELLE, Marie Lise Babu, 2019

Pink

You are shirking your responsibility as a woman
if you don’t, sometimes, wear high heels, do your
hair and wear a bit of pink.

–Isaac Mizrahi, Fashion Designer

 

The untimely doorbell
brings me hurrying in bare minimum
And he stands there, the god almighty,
all dressed up in expensive silks

It was no wardrobe malfunction
my torn nighty, untidy hair,
does my mouth smell?
did I wash between legs?!

Why are we discussing some
godforsaken seminar, goofed up by some
good-for-nothing idiot, who should have been kicked out
but was given a promotion and an award too?

The coffee comes to the rescue
and the mug is big enough but
allows an unintentional touch and then
everything changed

That carpet, the windowsill, the afternoon sun
that blaring music from the next door
cart vendors calling out fresh tomatoes
Nothing was pink.

 

He mouthed an impromptu poem
on my brown lips,
my flat feet and of course
on my thick dark eyelashes.

Translated from original Kannada by the poet 

Defining pleasure

If you are searching for that poem written especially for you,

you must remember that

writing a poem is like drinking coffee

brewing, filtering, whitening, and sweetening

precedes consuming

which is what happens in courting

But then drinking coffee is like making love

hot yet not scalding

sweet but not too much.

Enough but not unlimited. 

Now, if you are thinking what I am thinking

let’s have some coffee.

Vacation

The fish at the pond were a surprise;

Didn’t expect such abundance.

The snake in the grass evoked a hearty laugh;

What did it symbolise for the modernist? 

The golden sunset was a perfect backdrop.

Someone had made a proper bed;

Fresh sheets tend to have an allure

God, when was it, the last time? 

To get under the shower and get ready

was a pretext. You went for a drink at the bar

and I stepped out onto the lawn to speak to the fish.

When we finally met in bed 

I didn’t notice the lipstick mark on your shirt collar

and you didn’t bother about the grass in

my dishevelled hair.

What an orgy it was!

Lost 

You know every detail.

The black mole on my back

the small scar behind the left ear

the thumb with a nail lost.

You recognise every single curve

the silky smoothness

even in the dark.

You did not know...

when my sighs burned down the roof

when I crossed the seven seas

buried in your hug

when I just slipped away, vanished

while I kept kissing you...

You did not know. 

The Shadow of a Crow

The shadow in the shopping window shows a crow

The nude mannequin is untouched by the crow's beak

She is not tickled. Nor does she make any effort

to pull up the sheet

there is nothing to cover. The artist left out the details.

The display boy hugs and dresses her up

like she can feel

his erection but sorry, no wetness,

she is dry right through.

It’s important for him to place the price tag prominently.

It’s a sale. Discount is the order of the day.

If you don’t get a butter-fry

piece of meat you only have to pick at 

the toes made of the paper mâché and

it is at that exact moment that the shadow

of the crow disappears and the glass-eyed

mannequin stares back

with her fixed smile and the crow is

not interested anymore.

How?

Did I unwind all of my

binding six yards

carefully chosen by him

like a snake uncoiling? 

Did I reveal in a careless

or calculated casualness

the unmentionable? 

Then how come you know 

of all the bruises and black marks

on all my most intimate parts

hidden well under the six yards? 

I don't know, but why did you, 

didn't you, by the end of the second cup

tremble, remembering a woman in rage?

Poetry| Dipak Barkhade

Source: http://www.brambedkar.in/

(1)

Mother’s Saat 

My mother lived 
in the railway colony 
of Surat city.
She got married and 
came to live 
in the village of Selamba.
My mother saw
Grand-mother sitting 
in the shop 
everyday. 
She learnt 
to use katiyar, amboor, 
raapi, saat, 
and the nails
one day. 
Since then, 
I hear the noise
of saat striking 
the tiny dark nails 
in the hard leather chappals 
like the jolts
of an earthquake. 
The more I age
the more the nails pierce
into my soul. 
I ask my mother 
to continue her saat
no more. 
But she is 
stubborn 
not to stop it
anymore. 
I ask my mother 
Why? 
My mother passes me 
a smile 
of victory 
which is lost
in the history 
of love, labour and life.
Note: saat (an iron hammer in round vertical shape), katiyar (a needle to sew the broken part back to the slipper), amboor (nail clipper) raapi (a cutter) 


(2)

Ramai 

Learn how to love 
from Ramai.
She met
Baba saheb under 
a raining sky. 
Since then, 
To Baba saheb
She truly stood by. 
Both faced 
the challenge of sky.
Both pained 
seeing the fall
of the womb.
Both struggled 
to ensure the seasons 
of humanity bloom. 

Note: Baba saheb (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar), Ramai (the wife of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and mother of the oppressed of caste)


(3)

The Odour 

I did not see my mother at first.  
I had felt the odour 
near her breasts.
A new born,
I grew up 
on her milk and left
for the city
where I shared the colours 
with the upper-caste friends.
The colours had obscured 
the taste of milk
I had sucked 
on the breasts 
like a blossom of the breeze. 
But the long seated odour 
always beckon me.
Once, 
I went home back 
in the village and 
heard what 
Mr. Bhanu Luhar 
had reported:
“your mother tried
to arrange the chappals
on the iron rod
in the foot-wear shop.
Unable to take her hands 
to the uneven heights
She fell off
the stand.”
The glass of my eyes are 
shattered 
with the memory 
of imaginary fall
Though influenced by the colours
of city, 
I come back 
to my self-consciousness 
in angst 
again and again. 



(4)

The Taste of Roti

Both Ratilal and
Motilal had melted 
the cow fat 
in a tomb yard 
of the village.
They survived 
against starvation and 
protected their sister, Shanti 
from the upper-castes.
They heard 
they were 
the reserved castes. 
They day 
they became officers
they fed roti 
to their posterity. 
They did not know
the roti would 
swallow the past
in the love 
of taste. 
Today, 
the posterity roam
in the city 
clueless
of identity 
the ancestors shared. 


(5)

A Loss of Silver Bangles

Mother sold 
the grand-mother’s silver bangles
to the gold-smith
of Selamba. 
The eclipse 
of identity 
She herself had 
experienced. 
But she failed 
to grasp it. 
Mother was compelled 
to imitate the upper-caste norms.
She was restless 
to make money and
feed her children 
a future bereft
of her indigenous culture
until she saw
her children writing 
the songs 
of revolt. 


(6)

Dalit Mothers

All struggle 
in the search of streams.
The Dalit mothers 
store morsels
of hope
in the language 
of dreams. 
They have wept, laughed 
and danced 
with the mothers 
of the water, the forest and 
the earth 
of mankind. 
They share 
common dreams
in the indigenous stream. 
They embody 
a culture
evolving from the toil 
of day and night. 
They represent 
a path 
moving to the light.

Poetry | Bruce Bond

Van Gogh, Olive Trees

Design

The journey feels unlikely with coincidence

and fate, and yet whatever confidence

spins us through the great design remains

a little nervous.  I barely think of it.

Earth’s demise is something I write off.

Like a nightmare or vascular condition. 

Sunlight comes and goes and goes.  Who here

is any less compulsive.  Do the extremities

of alignment and disorder describe, for you,

two candidates for a bad day.  Lucky me.

My cat is funny.  Nothing means nothing 

to her.  She eats.  She plays.  She eats the hand

that feeds her.  Just kidding, she says, I’d never

do that.  And then.  By accident, she does.

Designer

Dante says the suicides in hell

search in vain for the bodies they threw

away.  So it is written, says the writer

to the soul for whom one life grew

inconceivable, one death unbearable

to the daughter he abandoned.  If

design is cruel, what does it say about

us, the designers.  I thank heaven

I was born to question, listen, choose

life and search for it in hell.  Dante says,

suicides turn to trees because they fall,

when they fall, at the feet of the trees.

I know you, I say to the branches, I

loved you once.  And looked for you in vain.

Poetry | Sharpest at the End: A Cycle of Poems | Trina Nileena Banerjee

Surrealist Cemetery, Christian Satin 

             “It began like a caress and ended like a knife wound,

It rained sharply all night

That late monsoon.”

“Weather Report”: Epigraph.

       In my dream

In my dream

When we touch

It snows everywhere.

When I wake

The sun has flooded

Every heart with fire.

We place

A bowl of still water

Between us and wait.

      Hourglass

Some mornings

The sharp thread 

To the future 

Is wrapped tight

Around god's teeth.     

The universe spins like a lunatic

Doing a dance only the flies understand,

Flipping and twisting, 

Drunk on the sweetness of decay.

Time is a giant chewing on the famished night. 

Something grieves inside the ticking clock.

The gap through which you see the stars

Is closing fast.

       
Shipwrecks

When you fall into the water from that immense height,

Nothing remains a matter of choice.

Necessity delivers you to pain,

The spinning sky is not your friend.

Grief overtakes you as sure as love.

Words are bubbles suspended in the brutal air,

The mermaids sing: but not for you.

The crimson of this coral,

The purple of that murderous ice, 

All this is yours.

There is a whole field of drowned plastic

That your heart must negotiate.

Little landmines that will never explode 

In your lifetime.

A ship full of dead fish stands in your way,

Each as precious as a beating heart.

Tin cans fill up your stomach like factory lead.

When you fall into the water from the certainty of doom,

You take your whole city with you:

The million sweating faces, 

The jungles of smoke and cooking meat,

The hopeless prophecies of the market.

You leave on the shore a single lamp-lit table,

Where love fell like a word nobody understood.

This is your harbour, this is the resting place of ghosts.

The water drowns you like language,

Drowns you without hope.

      Impossible Cartographies

I have stood across the sea

From an island on the horizon,

And said it was mine:

Under my breath, 

Feeling my heartbeat quicken,

Knowing not a map in the world

Would tell me its coordinates, 

That no ship would take me there.

I have said to myself that it was mine

Holding your hand across the impossible waves,

Our fingers have felt its shape, 

The soaking greenery, the unstoppable rain,

The rivulets freezing into ice over the difficult winters.

Knowing neither of us knew the way

You have opened sealed bottles from the sea,

In anticipation of its appearance.

I have felt in my belly the slow weight of its blooming flora,

Years have passed in making sure

That insatiable dreams do not devour our waking hours.

There is an island in time that was ours

It gleams on the ocean where we cannot see it,

But the map of our bodies is already its terrain.

It owns us, while we wait for the sea to send us a boat.

Perhaps this year, the waters will be kind to us.

      
Not You

What my fingers touch is not you.

The burning tip of the cigarette,

Droplets on the side of the frozen bottle,

The ashes of consequence, years wasted,

The third sleeping pill, the last two glugs

Of shampoo, slime, bubbles, 

A knot of hair stuck in the drain,

Hot, cold, brittle, tough, crumbly, wet

There is a whole universe of textures 

Open to my fingers, I plunge my hands 

Into everything, all day

But everything, all day is not you

This freezing, burning, coagulating, condensing, sticky, fuzzy, elastic world…

I am free to go anywhere, touch anything.

I even touch the rain, I stick out my tongue

But it is not you

Nothing I taste is you

Sweet bitter rancid tart burning hot

It makes no difference

There is no difference

Everything speaks of a fatal sameness

Not you not you not you

       

Scheherazade

I put my eye next to the miniature tree on the vase that belonged to my grandmother,

I try to discern the shades that make up its indeterminate hue, over the transparent glass,

Blue green aquamarine, and a slapdash splash of gory pink,

Where the cherry blossom was meant to be.

I wonder if she ever saw a cherry blossom in her life, my grandmother,

With a smile as wide as the hills, and always mixing, burning, mixing her metaphors.

You see, this is how it is, I begin to write to you of love,

And I end by telling you a story, every time.

I tell you a story like a half-finished painting by someone I used to know,

A painting I found in the attic when I was barely eight,

A painting I treasured till I traveled beyond its strangeness to the indifferent landscapes of the world.

I tell you a story that has nothing to do with you or me or love or this shameless, soaking mess we find ourselves in.

We stay as long as we tell each other stories,

And if dawn breaks over love's muffled cries

We will take our story to another night, barely floating through the morose daylight that fills the space-in-between.

A thousand and one nights stand staring at us in this room, this moment,

Two prisoners waiting for an execution, or a prince desolate enough to stake his kingdom on one more tale, or

The wild horse in the stable tearing at his bit in the depth of the night, his blood more crimson than the sky boiling at dawn.

The branches of that imaginary tree are purple and iridescent, on each branch a bead of glass shaped like a teardrop,

The tree whispers endlessly when the stars are dimmed,

The soil around the glassy roots grows moist, 

The leaves glow in a humid heat,

Such is the fevered delirium of the night.

The tree spins love like a fragile thread,

Its branches coil and unfurl like fingers,

It spins stories like threads like roots like wrinkled time

She spins all night like my grandmother and her grandmother before her.

And so too, I must finish spinning you this one,

Must finish spinning you like yarn before dawn, 

For what is love but a fond tale we tell each other,

Twisting the ends of a moist, humid core, untangling messy, stubborn roots from seething soil,

Looking, as fools often do, for sense, for sequence, for reason, 

Tighten this yarn around your fingers before you go,

For what is love but a thousand teardrops gleaming, like drowned voices bursting forth from the darkness of the night.

     

 Music

There is music between us.

Your fingers are the string and bow

And I merely formless sound,

Liquid air that trembles as you leave,

Somewhere in between coming, and going,

And coming again, skin and skin

Have condensed like fevered drops on 

Broken window panes, waiting for the wind

Again to come alive, for the night 

To become a dark sea of immeasurable 

Waves, noiseless and vast as only love

Can be.

     Resilience

When you give your heart out it is like an opened flower any boot can crush,

When you take it back it looks a bit like a brick with cracks in it,

And saplings growing out of its fissures,

It is an old thing - a brick - damp and mossy,

Burnt red and a little charred at the edges,

But with a brick you can build a house

Or bolster the clay oven where you make 

Your daily bread.

Admit it, we each have bricks and flowers

And so many hearts broken and fresh 

That we have stopped counting.

But we build our houses and bake our bread

Because at the end of a long night of love,

You are still hungry.

You cannot eat flowers, or can you?