Story Room

I love telling people about the pandemic in India
even before it’s over, like reading a dramatic note of past

like outbreak, that unfolds faster and faster, then milder
in uneven undertones, forming a suspense curve, in timely perks

I love to see them engrossed in alien land existing just outside the window
and the simplicity of all of it, brain stunts

So when I tell them about the contagion, I tell like it’s a hypothesis about shallow graves
like the plague existing in my mother’s lineage, beyond repair

plague underlined: the people who left never came back
coronavirus underlined: the cut that stored them alive within identity scar

so I say it’s the past, for a true story can be a dangerous weapon
for past is a language that cannot be altered and present another that changes the future

tonight I stay silent on the argument for it’s a sparkling papercut to the civilians;
that a voice might cut into streets, riots, savageries and six

this room is a chamber of dried cobbles and echoes of caves
this room is the only place keeping the secret of the lip remains intact to its place

Ajay Sawant currently serves as Editorial Director at Globalage Poetry and Editorial Intern at Five South Literary Magazine. He has previously also served as guest editor at Inlandia Institute’s Literary Review. He is an art activist and public speaker. His recent poems appear in Detester Magazine, VAYAVYA, America’s Art & Understanding Magazine, The Virgin Island’s – The Carrabian Writer, Hawaii Pacific University’s Hawai’i Pacific Review and forthcoming in Xavier Review, Inlandia: a literary magazine and The Louisville Review & Fleur-de-Lis Press Ajay can be reached on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ajaycycles. Recent publications include pieces in Rattle, Lunch Ticket, Louisville Review, Leavings Magazine, Claw and Blossom, LiveWire India and Christopher Hewitt Writing Prize.

King’s Court, Bandh

No cars on the roads, no tyres
rolling over the chalked squares
on the concrete strip between the
godown and the playground.
Tamarind was a paperback
on my mother’s bedside table,
a sketch in Singapore. Imli,
on the other hand, was everywhere.

In the silence, we ran relays
up and down the compound,
played cricket, played tapes
from England and America, bootlegging
sounds we reflected back like rooms
full of mirrors.

It was that sort of day,
exciting and deceitful,
sealed in a jar that smelt of vinegar
and eggplant, fried garlic and onion. Basic
like that. The radhachura branch
outside the dining-room window
glistening like an oiled muscle
flexed to strike. It must have rained.

Such happiness. Such sadness.
The dove-like softness of my sister’s hair.
The rhythm of hopscotch.
Over us the white carapace of history
muscular, marbled.

***

Mutations in scale

Try not to think of music: how blood sings
louder than machines, how solitude
scrapes the night. Substitute

instead a room
beyond the garden wall.
A lamp is on.

This is not our time, this time. The sound
of darkness is mechanical. Snow
drips. Instead of scales, here’s copper
hammered into moons.
Bubbled glass as counterpoint.

Note their silence.

Perseverance landed in a cloud
of dust. What stood out was
the pure nothingness of the colour red.

One day, we’ll breathe it in and break it.

Ayesha Chatterjee is a poet from Kolkata, India who has lived in the UK, Germany and the USA, and is now based in Toronto, Canada. She earned a BA in English and German from Smith College where she graduated cum laude. She has two poetry collections and has been published in journals across the globe including The Moth (Ireland),Magma Poetry (UK) and Exile Quarterly (Canada). Several of her poems have been recently set to music by Canadian composers in a range of genres, including classical, jazz and opera.

For Yoshiko Uchida

Not long after World War II,
when Japan was still rebuilding
its cities and its identity,
the young American writer Yoshiko Uchida
went back to the country of her parents’ birth
to study the great potter, Shoji Hamada.

One day, watching the agèd potter glaze
a ripe red line near the lip
of a new black bowl, she asked,
“Master Hamada, why
don’t you ever sign your pots?
You have so many imitators.
How are they going to tell your work
apart in the future?”

Hamada stared at his bowl. “My worst work
will be attributed to my imitators.”
He gazed at the young woman
through his circular spectacles
with their round, black rims.
“Their best work will
be attributed to me.”

***

Pumping Gas in Central Point, Oregon

Excuse me, sorry, state law!
You can’t pump the gas yourself here in Oregon.
Should I top it off with premium?

See from your plates you’re from California.
You’ve collected enough bugs on that windshield
to start a museum. I’ll clean it for you.

You here for Shakespeare?
Lotta people drive up for the festival.

Where you from in California?
Really? I was born right near there,
before the yuppies and the hipsters moved in
and the prices zoomed.
So I moved up here.
Plenty of folks in Oregon
hair as gray as mine.

Don’t speed, now.
The cops don’t even bother
with sirens anymore.
They pop a picture
and the ticket arrives in the mail
like you ordered it online.

Shouldn’t chew your ear off.
You got someplace to go.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
You know I used to pump gas
when I was a teenager.
Never thought I’d still be doing that
at my age.

Zack Rogow is author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His ninth book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. His play Colette Uncensored ran in London and San Francisco. He serves as a contributing editor for Catamaran Literary Reader. His degrees of are from Yale University and the City University of New York. www.zackrogow.com

Covid

I am a murmur surrounded by space—
others always at a medicinal distance
(of six feet or more) prescribed for survival.

I am a vague shadow,
a bit of motion
in another’s peripheral vision.

Even as we become more
solitary, we congeal
homogenized into dots and lines
embedded in graphs and charts.

Each of us is a minute pin prick
on the map of a disease
without center or borders—
a disease that hoards us to death.

Our statistical affinities define us:
the well, the sick, the dead, distributed
across geographies of horror.

Tell me.
Is hope only another naive insult
to whatever in wounded nature
lives resentful and insatiable?

Or, amidst this brutish desolation,
will we learn one breath at a time?

John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s lives in the U. S. and is Professor Emeritus from the University of Kansas.  His work has appeared in a variety of publications and venues, including The Connecticut River Review, Frontier Magazine, the Muddy River Review, Tuck Magazine, Scintilla, Better than Starbucks, MonologueBank, Angry Old Men Magazine, Madness Muse Magazine, Outsider Poetry, San Francesco, la rivista della basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, The Kansas City Fringe Festival, Business Casual Productions (New York City), Karamu House (Cleveland, Ohio) and the Cleveland.

Lemon Tart

Because it was hot, and because we were sweaty,
you sweatier because you are hairier than me;
because you said, “Wait, not yet,”
when I reached to embrace you again,
I rolled off my bed,
and ran butt-naked to the fridge
and took out what I had kept, it seemed,
for this exact, very moment.

Then I tiptoed back, and presented it to you—
a paper box with a single lemon tart inside it.
Soon, you were carving your spoon
into the edge of the soft yellow portion,
then you whittled at the biscuit until
you had just the right proportion
of cream to crust.

I watched as you took bite after bite,
steel in gleaming motion,
mouth opening, chewing, pursing,
swallowing in meditation.
I marvelled at your capacity
to have been just now just here, panting,
and then just as easily, suddenly there, slouched, nude and cross-legged,
absorbed reverently in ritual,
lost to the world, present only to tart;
how I loved you then, my heart fit to burst,
you digging your way, bit by focussed by bit,
to the center of your dessert.

Priyadarshini Gogoi is a writer, poet, children’s author and editor from Assam, India. Her poetry has been published on platforms such as The Shoreline Review and The LiveWire, and two of her picture books have been published by Pratham Books, with a few more releasing this year. Several children have told her that she’s cool.

Sun God

In the Mahabharata Karna the infant
is set afloat in a basket

illegitimate son of a princess
and the sun, raised by a merchant

his real story is one of self-destruction
I try to be an expert on this subject

Karna grows up to be an archer
the finest in the world

until his little half-brother
comes along to best him

Karna finally makes a friend
just his luck it’s the villain of our tale

and now he’s on the wrong side of a holy war
all the gods get involved

even his mother comes to him
the mother he yearns for

but now she’s come and revealed herself
only to ask him not to kill his half-brother

Karna is no Moses
and he will have no redemption

no hordes of followers
no one to pray over him

no, he will be a symbol
of how even the sun will abandon us

of how the wrong birth
is deserving of pity but not hero-hood

and how exactly did the sun
get a woman pregnant

is what I want to know
I’m told this is a bad question

I’m full of bad questions
like if I peel open my labia in the light

will I too have to send away a child
in a basket on the river

and what about masturbation
was the princess being punished

for digging inside herself
for her own deep pleasure

why can’t women step inside the temple
when they’re bleeding

I imagine little Karna sits at breakfast
while his adoptive mother stirs the sambar

and he is full of bad questions like
if you’re my real mother

then why do I feel like a god
and what I wanted to know at his age

was if one man’s freedom fighter
is another man’s terrorist

then are we on the wrong side of this war
but this a bad question

***

Pant Hoot

after Andrew Westoll’s The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

yesterday a man
visited my class
taught us all
how to laugh
like chimpanzees
together we vocalized

hou—hou—hou—hou—

invoking survivor chimps
in a sanctuary
outside Montreal
I wanted to know
how often they laugh

chimps freed from labs
cut open every week
shot up with tranquilizers
injected with HIV
housed in floating cages

Rachel the saved chimp
has episodes she chews
on herself bites
her own fingers bloody
only last week I laid in bed

screaming and hitting
myself in the face
until my partner spread
his body out over mine
like a gravity blanket

in middle school I poked
my wrists with needles
planting seeds or venting
steam surviving doesn’t always
mean you’re healed

when they’re not ramming
shoulders into cage bars
or spinning themselves
in endless stress circles
the chimps laugh

hou—hou—hou—hou—

***

Girls from the Island

at Christmas with my family
we scan our faces through an app
to see what we’ll look like in ten,
twenty, forty years

I’ll look like my mother,
then like her mother,
sagging caramel face
slowly bleaching white
like driftwood
left too long on a beach

inescapable:
a bird’s foot
caught in its own nest

women in my family never die
if only from stubbornness

later during quarantine
my grandmother calls with ideas
she’s been talking to someone
who heard from someone
whose friend knows ayurvedic medicine

here are four ways
to keep disease at bay
no global pandemic
can penetrate the sheer will
of my grandmother’s wishingunder her direction
my pregnant cousin

strings beads of dried asafetida gum
into a necklace and wears it
to her pre-natal appointment

Grandmother makes all us cousins
promise to mix equal parts
red rice flour, white flour,
and turmeric with water
sculpt a diya lamp
the size of an open palm
fill with oil
place it in our doorways
and the virus will burn from our faith

she tells me, cut up an onion
and keep the pieces around the house
boil a fistful of dried red chili peppers
with tablets of camphor
until smoke fills me

the British ended matriarchy in Sri Lanka
but only on paper
even across the water in India
they tell young grooms
not to marry a girl from the island

my grandmother gave me
bad knees and panic attacks
when my grandfather had a stroke
my grandmother thought
she was having one too
her fingers turned icicle
her heart broke her chest open
the world held no air

my grandmother
thought she would die with him
this mindset is what I’ve inherited
along with her female-pattern baldness

but I’ve resisted whatever gene
makes her believe a flower garland
draped across a god’s picture in a gilded frame
will grow if you pray hard enough
and a Ganesh statue
in some temple across the world
is drinking the milk offered by devotees

this, my grandmother tells me
is true faith
this, her legacy

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two hybrid chapbooks (I Once Met You But You Were Dead, which won the Split Lip Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest; and Dominant Genes, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Contest), two forthcoming graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one forthcoming collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

“a quivering sensation in the right arm was supposed to prognosticate union with a beautiful woman” – monier monier williams

Menaka, my mother, was parentless but beautiful. They pulled at their hair,
in dreams, pretending it was someone else’s: hers. They didn’t have to ask –
she appeared in the churning. Full grown and looking – daddy? – but no takers, risk
too great. Better to wait and see if anything was wrong with a girl stuck in heaven with
too many uncles.

++++++++++++++ They think they are so different here: wise and unused
to luxury. Fresh air is free and the costs of their presence invisible and when Kanva
needs to feel beloved by smarter faces he leaves me amongst them and their staid
advice. The big joke? He says he can’t remember his past, nada until he got to the woods
and looked to the stars and understood himself to be nothing more or less than.

The uncles love my Real Dad: they chant his mantra as though it will bring them literally
into the light. He knows what there is to know. Still, he is starving himself in case there is
more he might need to know, later, and so is too busy for visitors. Durvasas asked. What a
fanboy. Fan Uncle.

++++++++++++++You can’t live here unless you are a million years old. Forty, at the very
least: sons educated, daughters married off, wives tired. But no one says no to Real Dad, plus
Kanva had enjoyed the part where I mewled and then, later, when I broke my nose jumping
off the scarecrow. I’d thought I was a blue jay, mostly, until my body pulled at me and I
recognized myself in the statues of women lapping at one another, ignoring all

surrounding uncles. It wasn’t as though I didn’t understand about Menaka, who while not
exactly human was by no means a bird. I just. Well. What if we were the first family to give
birth to beings in the form that suited them best, that was beautiful to whoever was doing
the most beholding? They’d tried to christian me (hm) Gayatri, after Real Dad’s Greatest Hit.
So when I saw a boy by the fire I introduced myself before anyone else could get a word in:
Sakuntala.

++++++++++Unforgettable, he said. I raised my left eyebrow: are you planning to forget
me? There are verses about bent eyebrows: you’d think they’d be more abstract, similes
rooted in geometry, fractals, but quite a bit of it is bent eyebrows and the way no one can
quite figure out where the wind is going to end up when it leaves the ashram. Dusyanta, he

called himself, like the crown prince: there was a lot of energy around that fire. His bow’d
been snapped clean in two and he told me all about his lack of desire to eat our animals and
offend the surrounding uncles. I liked our animals and I liked the efficiency of the break. I
have a hut to myself, I told him. Kanva, who fathers me, is off being congratulated for his

hymns elsewhere. The thing is, he said, I’m not supposed to – Jesus, kid. Are you set to
inherit your father’s bow factory or something furiously banal? I know all about good
families and I promise not to bring a kid into yours. It was a teeth-bared lie (I knew nothing
about good families save the uncles’ regrets), but:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Don’t you want, he asked, to marry
first?

++++++I don’t want to get married after! Dusyanta, so-called (self-called), was beautiful
the way my mother was beautiful: the lines of his face were so simple I thought I might have
traced them into the earth with a snapped twig, the plane of his chest broader than prayer
can bring about. I had something of my father in me, or else the birds had given me form,

all knobs and bones and if I jumped again, I half thought, I might really take flight. Every
memory I’d been passed about village life repelled me. Kanva had done it properly, pukka.
Later I’d find out he’d had two daughters before me but I never once knew their names.
I took my pallu off my shoulder and bared my breasts and kept going with the unwinding

until the boy’s jaw was at his balls and I tied the end of the pallu to his wrist. Wait – he said –
and since I’m not my tragic mother I did. He untied his loincloth – o! – and tied one end to
my wrist. After the fourth rounding of the bases I figured it out, refused to switch direction,
pleas useless.

++++++++++Come on, he said. Actually I’m really the prince. For real, for real. I was just
playing it cool before. If we get married you could come raise our kid in a huge castle and we
could make things fresh: fuck caste, fuck colonialism – we could divest the place from
everything, make the whole thing like this forest.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++So he’s nuts, I thought, but we were
already naked, and after all: I liked the forest and if he had shown himself to be not in the
least efficient at least he had good taste. After the third homer I veered off and he began
to follow – should we douse the fire? Nah, an uncle will be by soon enough, probably – and

wow. It was fast, and he got redder-faced after, so I took down my hair and let it fall across
his shoulders like a pet shadow and explained that it had been great and should he be
interested in taking a fake hunting trip to this part of the woods again I would be interested.
Aren’t you coming with? he asked. This is the part where I rescue you.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++For real, for real?
He nodded. So then I know when you live, I said, in farewell. After my Real Dad found out my
mother had motives of her own for stopping by he cursed her so she could never see him
again, but I had no motives, so I was safe. I wasn’t going to give it all up for a man.

Rashi Rohatgi is an Indian American in Arctic Norway. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in, amongst other venues, Best Small Fictions 2021, Midnight Breakfast, and Crossing Borders. Jaggery Lit called her novella, Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow, “fearless and breathtaking.” She is currently at work on a novel. Formerly a reader for The Rumpus, she has been an intern for Ayesha Pande Literary, Reviews Editor for Africa in Words, and Fiction Editor for Boston Accent Lit, where she convened the Accent Prize. Rashi is also a former AWP and Binders mentee and a Bread Loaf, VONA, and Tin House alumna.

Dear Captor

Madison Hemings was the second of six children now known through DNA evidence to be the offspring of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.

How does one address owner / father at once—
sir? master? mother’s rapist?

How did you address my mother / your
property, who bore six of your children

in a sooty, windowless room, waited on—
you at your deathbed, helped dig your grave?

My mother, who when pregnant at sixteen with a future president’s child—
negotiated her offspring’s freedom, but not her own, never her own.

What would you—
say to her now?

Say it—

Say her name.

74,013

When Nonna was a bird,
she could smell the best
figs from miles away.

This is the old story she tells
in her kitchen as she readies
the fruit, runs her tiny thumb

along soft, purple curves—
pierces the flesh, blade’s flash
from end-to-end.

“When I was a bird, long ago, before you
and everything else, even before time—
I flew to this tree for the best figs.

“Sweet and plump, soft as summer rain,
smelling of bee’s breath, swollen with
sugar and sunlight…”

She pauses to stir syrup
in a copper pot, scent of orange
zest, honey, cinnamon rising.

“I was a bird until your grandfather
called me to earth
with a song.”

I can see the fig tree beneath which
they were married swaying
in a light breeze.

She places the heart-shaped globes
carefully in a terra cotta pan,
pours golden liquid over the top.

As Nonna wipes juice
from her hands, I notice the smudge
of numbers staining one small arm.

While the figs bake,
we rest on the garden bench.
I take her hand,

place my palm over her wrist—
feel her heart warble and throb,
preparing for yet another escape.

A COURTESAN

Tum-ta, ta-thaiyya,
the ghungroo resonates;
the floor is the chandelier
that breaks into myriad pieces of light.
The green of my zari gown
tugs at the green of my envy
as I watch the naaz, kham,
lachak, every graceful move
of the trainee courtesan.
Mornings are now a sharp peck
by the parrot on my finger
that draws blood, the only
red I’ll ever know.

ghungroo – a dancer’s heavy anklet bells
naaz, kham, lachak – grace of movement
In India, wearing red signifies a married woman.

Mandakini Bhattacherya, from Kolkata, is currently an Associate Professor of English at Fakir Chand College, affiliated with the University of Calcutta in West Bengal, India. She is a multi-lingual poet composing in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali, literary critic and translator. Her scholarly articles have been published in international and national journals, and also in books. Her poems have been published by international and national journals like Better Than Starbucks, The Dotism Journal, The HyperTexts, Poetry Nation, Mad Swirl Magazine, Setu Magazine, Muse India, Hayati, Sahityanama, Different Truths and LangLit. She was invited by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi and participated in the All India Young Writers’ Meet organised by it in February, 2020. She is Associate Editor of the MUSE OF NOW PARADIGM anthology published in 2020.

‘house-held things’

linen:

she flaps the sheet like a mast
the bed a ship that she does not sail
she beats the dust out of the pillows
the mattress she heaves to the open
she spreads a garden of flowers every morning
and at night she is crushed, the flowers stain,
she will clean them out the next day,
a ship that never sails, a garden abloom by day

dust:

she dusts with rags and with ragged hands
the settling of days gone, upon things owned
wipes clean ceilings, fans that hang, low and high,
surfaces seen and unseen and from the corners of eyes
she spreads out stars on the skies of her children’s wet faces
dusts away anger in case it settles in their hearts
and tells them that it is a boat on a sea which they
think is the moon’s arc
sometimes they tell her she is wrong

milk:

she stirs and stirs like a witch all day
but has none of the potion’s power
she stirs sweetness into glasses of milk,
milks the goats, the packets of skimmed, she milks
her body thin till there isn’t a drop left
and fills emptiness anywhere with the warmth
of a fluid, bluish white
as she stirs and pours, and cuts and kneads
and kneels and burrows and fills
and the cream that is meant for her feet
remains untouched
feet go unnoticed on floral sheets,
feet, unlike milk, curdle from beneath

thread:

she weaves through space, she ferries bodies across
up and down, she moves round and round
the chairs are for arranging, not for sitting on,
even when she’s the only one playing
and the music has long stopped, she doesn’t win
she weaves laughter into her aching fingers
as she braids hair in the mornings,
coursing them through the tangles,
untangling pain, stitching up the hurts and wounds
in the evenings, embroidering the sealed skin
with a flower or two, unspooling
and then reeling in threads yet unbroken
tearing out others from the hem of a long day

scent:

she fills her hands, her nose, her nerves
with the scents of turmeric, oil, fish, wet earth,
rotten food, watery stools, neem leaves, curry leaves,
antibiotics, cooking gas, bathroom cleaning fluid, dung
soap and ink during the day and searches her memory
for the scent of dreams that she bundled into a knot
in the corner of the pillow she rests her head upon at night
the scent is something like dried tulsi leaves
She remembers to use a special concoction to rid her hand
of the smell of labour before he comes in
and locks the door from within. a scent of him
takes over everything

cups:

she builds the worlds that you win but when
she dusts the trophies that you brought home
having conquered that which you already own
she cannot recognize her face in the reflection-
it is deformed, caving
she gathers those silver and golden cups
and places them on shelves, the duster and keeper
of your history and while you engage with one of your kind
about histories myriad vagaries, they twinkle and shine,
and she rises to set the cups for tea

jars:

she pickles the small onions as they do
in fancy Chinese restaurants (where
only her husband orders the food)
and finds a jar to keep their red-purple within
and out of nowhere she often hears
her father’s praise of her mother’s cooking
she makes room for the relish on the table
she wipes her hands on a muslin and then
places the jar at the centre of things,
visible, insignificant, a parenthesis
jars do not reflect, only hold,
that which will soon be served as side-dish

Dr. Sonali Pattnaik is a poet, academic and visual artist based in Ahmedabad, India. She has an MPhil in English from Delhi University and a PhD in English  from Mumbai University and is (former) permanent Lecturer in English at Delhi University’s Kirori Mal College. She is currently visiting faculty at St. Xavier’s College Ahmedabad. Her poetry and artwork have most recently been published in The Kali Project (Indie Blu Publication, Pennsylvania, USA, 2021). Her poems have found homes (in print) in Journeys (Sampad, UK, 2010), and in online journals including, CafeDissensus, Muse India, Wordgathering and Writer’s Asylum and her art most recently appeared in ‘Canvas Calling’ (The Shout Network, 2019).

Her academic publications include “Adaptation as ‘Becoming Other’. A Deleuzian Study of the film Omkara (V. Bhardwaj)” in In/dependence of Indian cinemas: Cartography of forms, genres and regions ed. Amandine D’Azevedo and Térésa Faucon, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2016 and ” A Dramatic Film: Performative Politics in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata” in Narratives of Indian Cinema ed. Manju Jain, PRIMUS, New Delhi: 2009 among several others. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in journals including The Book Review (Harper Collins, India, 2016), Intersections (Murdoch, Australia), Tehelka and Women’s Web among others.