आठवावा तुला ..
आठवावा तुला केशसंभार तो
यौवनाच्या वनी मेघमल्हार तो
आठवावी तुला वाळुची वादळे
प्राण देठातुनी मोडती कोवळे
आठवावा तुला गर्व दु:खातला
एक हुंकारही ना कुठे गुंजला
आठवावी तुला तत्वनिष्ठा खुळी
आग्रहांची दळे विग्रहांचे बळी
आठवावी तुला आत्मसंवादिनी
स्वत्व जे मुक्त हो स्त्रीत्व ओलांडुनी
आठवावी तुला जाणिवेची उषा
..आज सांजावता रम्य झाली निशा
Clayton Arble
1.
I have no songs left. I have no suns left.
I have no stars left on my balcony.
I’m taking off my heels, I’m tearing up my dress,
I am escaping my celebrity.
“--My wife--God rest her soul until I get there!--would never approve of that much smoke.--”
“--They're lucky I wasn't angry enough to let my Spanish out.” “--Have to get home to my kids.
Sorry. See you soon!”
I have no songs inside me, no more little sons or daughters left in my body.
I had a body, once, but I didn’t want it anymore.
I left her home. I drowned her. I wrapped her up until I couldn’t hear a sound.
I wanted the trashmen to find her. I wanted it to bleed. The little nibbles got me mad.
He had me, but I’ll never have him
and none of them will know:
“Hey, smile!” “Congratulations!”
2.
“I want you to take your little arms off of me.
I want you to walk by yourself as far as you can.
I want you to take action, take precipice, look into the thing’s white eye.
I want you to hero up, find your armor.
I want my shadow to stare up at me as I watch you.
I want you to know they'll hunt you, they'll crucify you by your palms, and they'll whip you.
They'll extract you, and you'll die, and you'll scatter out across the universe, a thin blue
projection, the little lies added onto the soil of the story, your mind being the firmament, the
setting that's worth losing.
I want to warn you, even if it means I'll get it too.
I want you to breathe through my lungs like an opera, like a poem so perfect it’s let a living soul
and a dead mind speak.
I want you to find a circuit of strength, and I don't want the pulse to stop until you're able to
come back home, intact or not,
Because after that, you'll explode into someone else.
You'll be a scatter of words reforming, the magnets in their hearts identical, coal-red but easy to
hold, and behold.
I saw you in a dream and you were alive again as a wave of joy. You told me you’ll find the
pieces again,
And then we'll go for a simple walk together for the first time in a very long time.”
964
I saw you from the bottom of the stairs.
You didn't see me. You headed towards our room
with her, your arm around her lower back,
and I'd said I was at my mother's house.
Before you shut the door, I said your name
and you didn't say mine. You couldn’t move.
"Five years," I said. "Five years I've been with you,
but how many have you been with me for?"
You took your hand off her and looked over
your shoulder, whispered something in her ear,
and only then did I blow up in tears
and ask again: "we have a son, a son—."
Your face was still solemn. It ate you up,
knowing what you had caused but didn't do.
You heard it from the bottom of the stairs
and sent our son to stay at my mother's.
Impromptu Burial
He died last week, at 34. The rain
was hissing on the roofs the night he died,
and everyone was in the room with him.
Some of us cried. His sister held his hand
until the warmth left it. His mother cried.
The rest of us breathed dry and heavy breaths.
We threw a secular funeral. Flowers
were planted. Coworkers paid their respects
and comforted his mother with stories.
Some high school friends came in and told stories.
The stories overlapped sometimes: “One time,
when we were Juniors—96 or so—
we stole our teacher's car and rode around
until the cops found us. Mr. Johnson
didn't press charges, but we failed his class.”
“Jonah was voted Student of the Year.
He tutored me to help me pass that class,
but I still failed. I got my doctorate
and called him up. We talked all afternoon,
and he told me about his software job,
his college days, his book writing. Jonah
was always Jonah, and he never changed.”
I've known Jonah since middle school. The rain
was hissing when he fell asleep and died.
Clayton Arble is a seventeen-year-old poet from Holyoke, Massachusetts. He likes to write poems through the stories of other people. He can be found at clayton.arble850@gmail.com
by Daniel Rury
You thoughtless creature, you skinless selkie,
stranded ashore as this brute’s hapless wife.
Flee, foolish seal, back to the sea.
Forget the children you bore to the
enraptured captor of your sea-kissed life.
You captive soul, you skinless selkie,
return to your kin. With slippery subtlety,
don your sealskin. Strip your strife—
the pains you’ve faced weaned off the sea.
Silently depart. Set off, finally free
from these wolfish hearts whence want runs rife.
You naive pup, you sinless selkie,
be wary. Never mind the sailors’ pleas;
they hunt your kind with hook and knife.
Swim with haste to your mother’s sea.
If you long for liberty, disdain folly.
Scorn these cursed highland cliffs,
you thoughtless creature, you skinless selkie,
and flee, foolish seal, back to the sea.
milk revised
by germs in suits—
time cards and
card stock
cheese cloths—
whey filed away
curds catalogued—
fungus futures
up again—
shift ends—
out goes
salt-licked
tie-clipped
vacuum-wrapped
white-collared Stilton
With words last spoken and humans long gone,
the age of the octopus quietly dawns.
Poseidon’s priests convert the hardened seas
with beaked beliefs and soft-bodied loyalties.
Black-eyed scryers tell the hue-addled fates
of tendrilled kings and their leery magnates.
Tyrants fall to cuttlefish assassins.
Dismembered fleets coat the ocean basins.
Abyssal trenches are daubed black with clustered
palls of ink like clouds of sulfur mustard.
With words last spoken and humans long gone,
the age of the octopus quietly dawns.
Colossal squids, titans from Tartarus,
crush pacified octopodes now turned viperous,
until quick-witted heroes deal the last blow,
mounting thick-headed whales from leagues below.
Lonesome scribes notch their tales on dried kelp leaf.
Submerged karsts house immense sunk reliefs—
the gently carved wraiths of ancient victors.
The crafty become history’s depictors.
With words last spoken and humans long gone,
the age of the octopus quietly dawns.
Lusting for power, cruel rulers beseech
their strangleheld shoals to stuff their fat beaks.
They cling like leeches—curled, hypoxic snakes,
latched on fallow tides. The breathless sea shakes.
The senates crumble. Tired treaties dissolve.
Doomsday believers find short-lived resolve.
Then all that’s been built, nation and border,
fumbles, stumbles, and writhes toward disorder.
With words last spoken and humans long gone,
the age of the octopus quietly dawns.
Daniel Rury studies ecology and journalism at university. He uses poetry to cultivate budding ideas and to revive an interest in old, withered narratives.
The curtains close
and my lungs spill.
Something about the way
the tambourine rings
rattle shut the daylight
that pierces my eyes,
much like rememberings
of my childhood that
clamp close my sight:
how I broke that girl’s
toy stethoscope and
white-lied my way out –
I haven’t heard hearts
beating since;
how I pushed away
my Ba, never once
letting her touch me –
she won’t anymore,
she can’t anymore;
how I chose under unjust
force whom I loved more:
Mom or Dad? –
the answer haunts all my nights
and superstition is my nemesis.
I’ve come to deplore
these pages of sunlight that
slant through my window,
and into my life
and wash away
my layers of grown up,
unpeeling them to the apple core
that they would all throw away.
the street bleeds coconut water,
creaking of gleeful squeals of
lukka chhupi,
then slips into silence,
like precious change tucked into a pocket
and the sun sinks into the sea,
a pebble plopping
into its wrinkled gray skin
and the mad crowd
crooks at the knees
with the receding beat of the drums and shehnai
and the cement embossed around
tiny footprints
is swept clean
by the tinselled edge of an impaling red saree
and a hand fenced in gilded bangles
is strung towards the harbour,
by another,
weatherbeaten and calloused,
and each footstep is
a leaden block dragged aboard,
to be lifted and set asail
towards the ineluctable truth,
like a plume of smoke
stealing out of a bleak factory pipe,
ebony dark, intense ab initio,
then spreading out,
shrouding all
that lies beneath,
and a single tear dribbles
down her mother's chin and
somewhere,
a light is switched off.
Dhruvi Modi is 20, and a student at Sophia College for Women. She has loved reading and writing since she can remember, and is an avid daydreamer. She loves walking, being by herself, and has been caught talking to herself very often.
I think of you in sweet words – passionflower, amethyst,
hailstorm, collarbone. I think of you in images & the noise
of the night we first talked. I must approach you gently
as if you are a special kind, a different sort of rosebud
silhouette against the sunrise of my near-forgotten dreams.
You sit like a tart raspberry on the tongue of my mind,
waiting to be tasted & swallowed & understood – consider
the shade of the mornings in the place where I grew up &
then ask me again why my favourite colour is grey. Ask me
again why I turn infatuations into indulgences, tempting
like sunflower bouquets, like dazzling springtime skies, like
raspberry-flavoured skin. Ask me again why I ran away, only
to write it into all of my poetry and drown it in a sweetness
I do not understand. I will tell you someday about all of the things
I did before I learnt to find my mouth on a map. You won’t believe
me.