TBR brings you two poems from Kunjana Parashar's debut poetry book They Gather Around Me, the Animals.

Finally, we compromised and replaced your biography with this poem.

Chewing Bengali paan, mixed with spices and lime, runway girls follow him to the town hall, for a symphony of molten desires.

Lesson learned; I will stop counting, but you’ve taken my booze, taken my music; I’m only a man after all.

Your signature phrase so Britishly conditional, the words cross-grained with hope and irony,

He smells like Irish Spring and lots of it. I offer him an agnostic smile.

when suddenly our dog swoops in like a hungry kestrel burrowing deep sniffing your sweat

Elevated into the high rafters of heat,

TBR pays homage to the last of the Beats-poet Gary Snyder, who turns 95!

After dinner I hear the music of the ceremony  across the street.

You board another train, but it’s another season, maybe even another year. You travel quietly. Pairs of eyes sit across in varying degrees of kindness.

Plant mother to plant mother, I get it The sun shines on, dutiful and tired And I am tempted to break

On Hamlet’s flute old bones of Elsinore shook and shuckered up the graves they died and dyed the earth in.

The dead mattered more than the living.  One night, the fire alarm didn’t go off.

And the rain swept in a little fast for her liking but there was no helping it was there And nobody picked up the phone when she called

Air flavored like Fralinger’s             Saltwater Taffy my grandparents sent             from up north: vanilla,

Is our fear of emptiness a fear of being or non-being? We wake in a house of galaxies

Contemplative jazz reveals the intricacies of human hearts without being overly dramatic, or sappy.

Four poems from Bhaswati Ghosh's collection Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen.

You drown each taco in a habanero sauce that alarming shade of orange exclusively reserved for traffic