Keep
I don’t see it as a word anymore spell out every letter enunciate every syllable begging for kinship from a word so distant, like your grandmother’s saris, the one in the pictures where she smiles unaware of being photographed woven in Banaras, home to poverty and colour, eyes wandering from
Rubber Fire
Horizon catches the cap of our neighbour’s fire oiling gashes through wood floorboards spiked with old plimsolls. The deadliness is in the sunsink behind the flames: in things suspended there is so much space quivering from absence into being. Strange faith. I tap your shoulder to ma
because my mother’s best friend is catholic
today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit – the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, cou
Cinema
My grandparents came from a movie-going age – he would call from the office and my grandmother would dress all her children in evening clothes, and wait. At the cinema, the world dissolved into light and sound, the salt of popcorn on your fingertips, and pink soda that fizzed up your nose,
The Lakebed
In a riverless city, the promise of water is enough. My mother and I pin our hopes to each monsoon, and evenings in June that stroll the circumference of our bayou-to-be. Starved of fish, the empty lake harbours cattle, gangs of dogs and cricket games — we see snatches of batsmen thr
Silk Road
金, the gold caged bodhi tree among monks one quick-tempered another on the phone another ten years old dying monks among dying tourists among red eaves and paper walls they speak of peppered chives and burnt tea (and a cat strutting across the floor) 火, the fire has long deserted t
the smell in my room
What if the smell in my room is not the brown skin samosa cold in the corner, grease leaking through wooden floors, or the curry my mother left dead on the desk next to the photos where sunlight from a distant summer is caught between some fat boy’s teeth, laughing with [&h
Crawling Order
forget about hands and knees– his chest is on the ground. he is flattening himself like sourdough naan as men in hats stand sentinel and impatient. this procedure takes all day he is heaving his bones–elbows bear the weight of stomach, ribcage, legs for the distance of one hundred and fif
Telling with my eyes
This piece was originally written by the hugely influential Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa. Despite his many contributions to Japanese literature, his work is seldom translated into foreign languages due to his ascetic values which kept it hidden from the public eye. This piece is an attempt to intro