As a book of poetry, Megan Fernandes’ Good Boys presents a prescriptive examination of the self. But as a body with life in it, it shatters what is known by intentionally moving through its own tempers. What does it mean to be good, and who assigns this meaning? In all its messiness, Good Boys lays … Read More
The dull, heavy, clouds of smoke block my fleeting glimpse of the fallen krishnochura flowers. When I was five – a cowering bundle in the backseat of Babu’s stuttering motorbike – He taught me how to tie my helmet and how to differentiate a krishnochura from a radhachura. I barely knew how to separate the … Read More
a conversation is two mouths made one by a knot of string, strung taut and fluoridated and hamstrung and tasting one singular voice. one mouth indentures of the other to concur with silence as an outturn pidgin emerges. its decreolization subverts the first’s imagery and dreams of deification. the sway of rasa is the theme … Read More
In a word, Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Poetry Prize-winning collection Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved is virtuosic. It sings, thrums with the force of centuries of Urdu and Persian verse. In doing so, it owns the strength of a woman’s voice. In the title poem, Talukder writes, “At December’s end Benazir died / in … Read More
Granddaughter, When I was fourteen, I crossed fourteen rivers, walked to every village that fell under Big Mountain’s shadow, knocking on the door of every medicine woman that knew the mountain rock as her own altar—passing a message, trick of safety, ruse to rouge unmistakable into ordinariness. They hid their medicine in the rocks of … Read More
She arcs an aural eclipse. Last night, the ashes swallowed us whole; a stream of rajgold bangles parting the brahma ghat, throat full of pink salt, ghazals spilling over the ornate moon’s boheme venture. I, milky meteors, trace your eye-lined courtyards slowly, ever so slowly. To remember the dead orphan who once named djinns after … Read More
As the year wraps up, I want to highlight five poems by South Asian poets I’ve loved and noted in 2019. I turn to these widely published, critically-acclaimed poets when I find my own budding poet-self stuck within the limitations of needing to write about South Asian identity. These five poems are pure and impassioned. … Read More
like bugleweed, my unshaven hair is sprawling into sajda after all these years, these legs i’m still hauling into sajda when i went down on you i accidentally muttered a prayer my back turned to stars still feels like i’m falling into sajda i’m sorry i keep entangling broken verses in your curls it’s just … Read More
i have tried to catalogue my own mutation as my body peels gradually away from the place i come from. i cannot recognize this shape anymore, each time i walk on a straight edge it feels like a border, any line becomes a carving of land. i can’t think about the blue of water without … Read More
I met Vijay Seshadri at Dunkin’ Donuts. We sat in the patio, where a statue that looked like the Virgin Mary watched over us. He wanted to meet at Dunkin’ Donuts because it is a very South Asian franchise. Like motels, like 7/11s, brown people with roots in a mountain-fringed subcontinent tend to stand behind … Read More
