Untitled

One cup kept empty and side by side
as if forgiveness is a service
due when you shake the dust off

and the other overflows with coffee
heats your mouth with lips
that blacken when one hand

is grasped by the other and the spill
towed to where the dead overflow
as evenings: an entitlement

that returns the darkness
before the sun comes back
brings the light that once was water

fills this small cup with a morning
you will clear with a soft rag
holding it close to the wooden table.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Weston Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at http://www.simonperchik.com. 

To view one of his interviews please follow this link

On Not Having Written King Lear

I don’t have to tell you what it’s like: you know.

It’s just like never having written Middlemarch 

or walked on the moon. You know that most 

people have never written Middlemarch

or walked on the moon and yet still get to eat jam

and toast, and stroll with their beloveds

past the cemetery, over the bridge to Main Street.

You know that what you can’t do is also worth

celebrating as a source of relief or gratitude,

that love comes only from not being the same

as what you love, that everyone is just one person

and cannot step out of themselves and be

everywhere, as the ponderous afternoon light

that is falling and slightly pink is everywhere.

It’s Saturday. So many people have come out 

to browse the lonely shops, happy to just look, 

to do nothing. But that’s something, 

just as our beloved promising that this 

wrecked wicker armchair can be saved and made 

to catch the light again is something: proof 

our love is good enough, our masterpiece 

to see, to feel awe, at anything,

to let our dumb-struck silence make things whole.  

Dinner in Xanadu

How relieved we were when the man from Duluth

said the beluga-tongue soup was good, but not as good

as the dandelion soup he’d had one summer

as a child in Labrador. And when the Finnish twins

said how they missed the way, back home,

the sorrows of strangers would become their sorrows,

we all nodded while the next course was prepared

in front of us: white cobra hatchlings drowned in wine.

Then the Sri Lankan asked the waiters

where the master was, saying that only he

could teach us how to stomach these new joys, 

how to prefer them to familiar griefs. 

But there was no reply: only a sound like weeping 

coming from the master’s room. And so 

we kept on eating: squirrel-tongue mousse,

poached emu eggs, a butterfly confit.

Maybe tomorrow would be better: black swan

stuffed with songbirds, and the bee wine at peak fizz.

And maybe not. Maybe the present always

has to be endured, even in paradise. Maybe

what’s gone is always brighter than what is.

Michael Lavers teaches poetry at Brigham Young University, Utah. He is the author of After Earth, published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, and the Georgia Review. He lives with his wife, writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, in Provo, Utah. He won the £5,000 Bridport poetry prize with his poem ‘Low Tide’, in November, 2020.

Aubade

The mid-morning light feeds my words,
a vice I got from painters great and poor
who labor in a rabbled mess, whose works
crowd my walls. They taught my eye to pour
details from the common rummage of bungled names
which sprang from a maker’s moment and now dissolve
in daily fray. This light forbids the vain
ponderance, raises the crevice from the blunt of gloved
quotidians to stand disrobed in the solar mind.
The pool’s motioned lace, the orchid’s lobe,
the squirrel tail’s refrain that curves to rhyme
its jolts. Morning welcomes the mind’s grope
of all it becomes. This throng of world can hope
to choir when function’s silenced by verdant trope.

Flying over Bonaire

Against the unwound spring of coast
whose bowl curve frills with surf,
I see the earth blushing
in a lace of last-suds clouds.

The vapor crumplings have aligned
into a counter curve, just as lax,
and, like the coast, almost straight now
that the wind has taken the tide’s cue.

These two premonitions of form
scissor heaven with their partnering,
and are like another pair–
the eye and point of view–

which knit the world as they loosen
from each other. The intersections glanced
are but another couple on the mind’s
dance floor, too joyed to glimpse
themselves clumsy and off beat.

Pulitzer nominated Ricardo’s poems have appeared (and/or will soon) in Ambit, American Journal of Poetry, American Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, Burnside, The Common, december, Ekphrasis, The Fiddlehead, Hudson Review, Ilanot Review, Island, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Plume, PN Review, Poetry, Prism, Quadrant, Southern Review, Stand, Vayavya, Virginia Quarterly Review, Volt, among many other journals. 

The Pit

The mask hides the quivering corners of my lips
And the flare of my nostrils.
But what about everything that tries to brim out into the eyes?

I wash, wash, wash everything.
But, what about the dhaniya leaves that hate getting wet and then rot all week?

I walk every other day to confuse the virus,
And bring home the yezhilai paalai flowers.
The trees bloom only in October.
The fragrance keeps me company on the days I don’t go outside. But, the flowers rot.
And creatures that found solace amidst the petals,
Run out confused.

I rest in my balcony,
Soaking in the autumn sun.
And then I hear my neighbour cough.
I add his vile act to the pit of possible corona causes,
And make a note to strike it out after 14 days.

Or, was it 15?
Of course I forget.
And there my neighbour’s cough continues to live and rot,
Like the debit card returned by the maskless grocery lady,
Or the change the water can boy returned,
Or the pizza seasoning the food delivery boy gave me,
Or the pass the toll booth man returned to me.

I brew and drink, brew and drink,
That bitter kashayam
Recommended by the government.
And as I throw the waste away,
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to clear the putrid swamp this virus has 
created, In the minds of humans.

Dhaniya – Coriander leaves
Yezhilai paalai – Commonly called devil’s tree or blackboard tree; An evergreen tropical tree that’s native to Asia, China, and Australasia

Radhika Jayaraman is from Chennai, India. She’s a feminist, writer and social entrepreneur. She believes that the pen is a powerful voice for those who are not heard.Her work has appeared in the Bombay Review, The Open Road Review, and The Hindu.

 A Temple

Then they came, then they came in droves
Shouting and chanting some lord’s name
Wearing tilaks and bhagwa 
Poleaxing as though it’s a game.

Loudly, loudly, we – macaques – cried
Up, they eyed the shrinking branches,
Howling and stoning from the side
Guzzling the jungle in batches.

To the sea, to the sea we ran
In tatters, we looked for ripe hope
While they savagely coined a plan –
Temple for the tailed-devotee. 

Then they made, then they made a fool
Of us all, and the latter
Prayed and marched as a cutting tool
To muzzle the dissing-scatter. 

Can I Tell You A Secret? 

I woke up on a farm not too far
from the scene of the crime with
purplish blood on my hands and a strange
sound of déjà vu. Yes, it was almost like
this had happened before, but I
couldn’t recall the events chronologically,
so I let my amnesiac mind rest. Now all I
need to do is wash my hands thoroughly lest
I get caught, and come up with an excellent,
four-tiered plan to shift the blame to the
enemy that’s bantering on about the death
of democracy and once again prove him
right. Anyway, who can stop me when a flock
of rim-horned mhehh-mhehh is behind me? I’m
the King and the Counselor, the Weapon and
the Wound. 

Karthik Keramalu is an Indian film critic and writer. His works have been published in Film Companion, The Hindu, Deccan Herald, The Quint, etc.

Obelisk

tonight, I fall in obsession with anyone
who notices me, drag them to that shore
of half sleep where reaching towards a
dream feels better than being in it, caress
them in the fridge glow of fantasy, incu-

bate their impressions then foster them
fettered in my fusty mind, to the point
that the real & the imagined become
strangers walking back to return their
cups of chai, one smoking a filter at the

dangling lighter, the other scouring his
fingers with oil from a plastic wrapped
jaggery bun, one spilling kafka the other
filling frost, two people diverge in my
mellow hood & I’m sorry I’ve lost them

both, at the end of the day we’re all alone
but hey it’s only morning now so I carry
an obelisk on my shoulders, black hole
in color, horizon in shape, reaching to-
wards that shore & draping it like a

double helix shawl of hourglass sand &
even though parts of my mind war secrets
at each other I touch myself with the obe-
lisk, with the world, scratch my body in
vinyl scars that make me music as I run

against my falling obsessions, touched
by the stylus of the world in exit wounds.

Panorama

someone has to slide to the doorway
to fit the whole family in the frame-
everyone a splitting image
of everyone else.

holding the picture the girl
is reminded that jellyfish
is ninety-five percent water
but still jellyfish not water.

ants gladiatored in the colosseum
plastic box which once was
full of naranga mittai lemon candy
in grandpa’s greenshuttered shop
& later would heavy with surf excel
but at the time was pricked
for breathing space bathed in wonder
ants wouldn’t fight even though
the boy had picked them up
from different tree castes.

father spreadsheeted formulations
of organic compounds like frogs
desire, karupatti coffee, embraces.
mother was all the words at once
invading meaning by the sound of it.

when she hit him with her girl knuckles
learned everyone would have helped
had she soaked up the punch with tears instead.

boy will unlid & bury the exhausted
ants will be going on with a tulsi leaf
to mark their graves even though
he will shed all rituals becoming man.

mother will boy when father goes
she stops letting the neighboring sounds
tamper with the meaning of family.

the girl holding the picture mothers
when the father goes she tilaks
his garlanded memory & the fumes
of the lamp blacken her knuckles.

when she whispers the life inside her
none of her words are all her own.

when boy fathers his baby will suck
the girl’s knuckles reminding them
there is no gluttony in landscape
that everyone was always scrambling
up the plastic walls climbing
the fragrance of lemons & detergent
& all the images leaning on the walls
threatening to rubble them into dust.

For Frida Kahlo

For the bluehouse woman,
A blue house was built.
Woman of azure azul.
Bluehousewaali.
Pot-and-pan-waali.
Ceramicwaali.
The linen madame
Of housewifey kitchen.
For the thickbrow woman.
The so-called woman.
The jilted one.
Painted one.
Sore and salty.
One that was her own fetish.
The two-faced one
The naked-naked one
The mirror-clad whore
Middle-parted bitch who
Built herself the bluehouse.
For whom the bluehouse arose.
For whom the death of blue.

Atreyee Majumder is a poet, writer and anthropologist currently teaching at the O P Jindal Global University. She is researching the contemporary life of Krishna bhakti in Vrindavan and recently finished a PhD dissertation at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University. Her first book on the time and space related to late stage capitalism – Time, Space, and Capital in India – is published with Routledge (2018), while other work has appeared in Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Sunflower Collective, the RIC Journal, The Bangalore Review and The RIC Journal.

In June, midsummer melts into monsoon, the rain
beats its fists on the door, knots its hands in your stomach
floods your little room until the mahogany bed
sinks.

In June, you almost die on your way home from work
it takes three hours to cover five miles of tar, goat shit, infrastructural
failure. inside, a cracked roof (a strange-shaped mouth), debris, a few dazed insects;
you have come home, panting, when the clock has let you,
to find your home is gone.

In June, a man axes his wife to death, nine men rape a woman
in front of her children. A cashier at the bank tracks down your number, leaving
a string of hungry messages. On the corner of the street, a car runs over a small dog
white with brown spots and a lolling tongue. You carry him to the vet, hands shaking,
where he dies.

In June, you take a cab to your mother’s house, her hands are
taped in wrinkles; her arm is a soft black-pink where it burnt down to the bone
when you were four years old. She has made biryani for twenty since, fluffed out, scented,
cinnamon-laden, long-riced, bubbling with tomato paste and bitter, glorious onion.
But you haven’t.

Your mother and her mother have not been
women who give up, unlike you.

In June, it is three years since you have come back
to your country, hoping you could change it, hoping you could change something, anything,
you have come back to your country, drunk on middle-class idealism,
to find you need more leaves.

Kashaf Ali is a Fulbright Scholar, and a graduate of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She currently lives in Karachi, Pakistan, where she divides her time between managing education systems, teaching sociological thinking, and writing not-so-fictional fiction.

Still (a meditation on meditation)

The dead can do it.
From them I learn
to be still, & quiet.
Still, my thoughts are loud.
Still I murmur in images.

Still, there are
miniscule movements
I can’t control, when I sit “still” ~
gentle tremble
of hands, eyes, lips…
& the mind’s blizzard
of pointed letters.

In a not-quite-forgotten
full lotus pose ritual
I begin to fill my body with
an expanding soul
steeped in the spirit of the
whole universe’s blue lotus.
One turning.

Night unfolds the contours
of her charcoal velvet blanket,
& I sense my red magnetic
spirit drawn toward you
more than beforehand ~
another movement
I cannot control.

My emptied hands reach
for the circle of light
you wear around your
dancer’s figure
across the border river.

Echoes of your evening teachings…
lightning on my inner night’s horizon.
Electric charges surge through your form,
flicker in your liberated laughter
& gentle maple sugar tones
to flash truths before my heart’s eye.

In the beginning was the Word,
& the Word is with you still.

Words Heard in Dreams

(Age 6) “Your life is just one dream I am having. I have dreamt many lives before you.”

(6) “You have to give up one of your senses. Which one do you choose to lose?”

“Come to poetry, come to me!
Go to music, go to me!”

“This is the year of the Key.”

“When all the inner obstacles fall away, you naturally enjoy the highest state.”

“BEING so good, being SO good, being so GOOD.”

“I would pick up two things off this desk ~ Eternity, & your present time with her.”

“There is a way out of this dream,
& for you it is through love.”

“Spaces are known by what they hold.”

“The body of Light. This is the body of Light.”

“Do you mind living in a haunted house?”

“Just be aware. She’s everywhere.”

“It is the third road we must take in the end, the path within.”

“How do you wish to wear the work you bear?”

“Strum the lines on the calendar.”

“May wisdom walk at your side
& speak for you when you stray.”

“How many stories are hidden
at the bottom of every pocket on this street?”

“To love to be free to see.”

“Turn the key of pure awareness
in a keyhole the size of your own body.”

“Hold your mind,
hold your light ~
his coming-to
has come into sight.”

“Why are you still
barking into a well?”

“Careful ~ everything here’s on a timer.”

“We’re turning into a tree.”

“See what you can do with silence.”

“’People dream?’ says the dust.”

Does it have to be hard to design words?”

“If you are not in the sequence of the heart, what next?”

“We pursue & pursue the truth until we need rest.
We finally see ~ we are pursuing our Self.
And then, the REST.”

~~~

“Are you awake enough to see from the eye of the heart?”

David Leo Sirois is a Canadian-American poet who has had 93 publications in six countries (USA, France, England, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg & Zimbabwe) in two languages so far. He lived & performed in Paris for seven years, where he hosted a weekly multi-art open mic called Open Secret. He now hosts the global open mic, Spoken World Online, from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada, his birthplace. He won Third Prize in Winning Writers’ Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, & his poetry has appeared in journals such as The Poetry Village, The Sunday Tribune Online, Ariel’s Dream, The Opiate, 21 Magazine, Time of the Poet Republic, The Gronthee, THE BASTILLE, Paris Lit Up, and Terre à Cièl. He is currently submitting two manuscripts for publication, and writing two more.

Anuvaad

Translation happens when two languages make fervent love
on the creaky charpoy of literature
It doesn’t commence on the pure whites of serene pages
But in musty rooms on dusty bedsheets, rented by the hour
Creased with years of isolated destinies and skin coloured cravings
Languages undress text and strip semantics
Unbutton sentences and unzip grammar, like hungry lovers
They reveal their naked selves
In the never-ending gaze of two mirrored silences
sizing their own infinite possibilities
Then,
one language climbs atop another in a feverish, teenage frenzy
As if to make love
Instead, they trace one on the other
with chalk like hands on the slate of their chests
celebrating the akshar and the alphabet
the shabd and the word
Redefining the age-old alchemy, not known to any linguist yet
They giggle, knowing they were born from the same birdsong
One language yields
Her letters part to reveal their honey warmth
And the other language penetrates,
Infusing the scent of fresh earth of the land it came from
Translation happens when languages give each other
the solace of their rhythm
When they impart not just their syntax but their faces
When they both experience a unified star burst
of uncaptured meanings
They lie after this maddening rush
Legs intertwined in the mesh of satiated phrases
Whispering softly the million ways, in which
they could keep translating each other
not knowing when language took the surname Bhasha
and translation transformed into an Anu‘vaad’
so they could argue and enjoy this beatific makeup sex, repeatedly
Until a new dictionary is born each year,
in remembrance.

Sanket Mhatre was the chief assistant director of Kavyotsav 2001: the first bilingual poetry reading festival of Marathi and Kannada poets. He has held several poetry reading sessions across the country. He performed at Kavyahotra 2018, the 72-hour poetry reading festival in Goa with 9 poets from other languages. Widely published, he has also been the first Marathi poet to read at Vagdevi Litfest & Jaipur Literature Festival in 2020. He’s also the creator & founder of Kavita Cafe: A Youtube Channel that captures the best of Indian Poets in recitation.