Tagore and I
Rabindranath Tagore – renowned poet and composer, writer and artist, philosopher and polymath – has always been revered as a God-like figure in city-bred middle class Bengali families, and ours was no different. As a child growing up in the US, my understanding of God was limited to Ma’s daily
Post-Mortem of a Fallow Field
I dreamt of home last night. Your eyes were green – a cut of lime against the tongue – they startled me like birds start at the sheep-herds bawling. You had warned of something mystic, pearl chowders, purple dusks – you had said:
Waiata-tangi o te moana: The Seafarer
This is my own creative translation of the first 18 lines of the anonymous Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Poem The Seafarer. I have incorporated te reo Māori words (and the occasional OE) in my translation, as I’ve wanted to give the reader a glimpse of the beauty of bilingual expression. The poem is
embroidery
sitting cross-legged on the veranda couch, I try to mirror the patience of your voice when threading the needle for the fifth time, wanting to sew your speech into linen and have it rest in my dress pocket. naively, I swaddle myself in the temporary, slipped like a bookmark betwee
The Jam Jar Forest
we went looking for the Jam Jar Forest, with memories in jars – shutting the lids tightly, so they wouldn’t leak on the way. we searched the night horizon for silver branches craning upwards in a moonlight photosynthesis. i said, listen, for the singing of a finger on a wine glass rim. follow it
Shibari Teddy
Trigger warning: themes of sexual assault Last summer, I had an unhealthy amount of sex. I would wake up, meet someone, sleep, and repeat for weeks. This wasn’t new, but the intensity was. It felt like an obsession – more than that, it was a full-time job. The sex itself was new: in experimentin
Searching for Seashells
When we were much younger, my little sister spent one restless summer searching the shore for starfish. She dug her tiny fingers into the sand, gathering them excitedly in a bucket until they dried up, and then cried over their sorry cracked bodies. The holidays that followed, she took to walking th