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November, 2024

Of Love and Laundry

Grateful for any help, I wept. My ex-sister-in-law. My friend. I had screamed Shame on you. My enemy holding my laundry.
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November, 2024

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy

Rituparna Sandilya reviews Sumana Roy's Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries
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November, 2024

Dancing with Shame

I should say no more dancing on the outside since shuffling shame-faced off the stage classmates snickering But sister of spring’s first daffodils
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October, 2024

Drones

He watches it drop silently into the trench between the soldier’s legs. Yuri clenches, as if the grenade has dropped into his own lap. The Russian soldier scrambles to rise up as the grenade explodes. Yuri stubs out his cigarette in
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October, 2024

Perennial Daughter

My mother’s kitchen counters are forever scented by lemons she juiced
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October, 2024

Epitaph

We found a middle-aged couple standing statue-like next to a new grave, a garish sign on the stonework reading Ghulam & Sons. I remember finding that interesting—a Muslim name in a Christian cemetery. Niharika said something about how sad the
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October, 2024

Two Poems by Noreia Rain

it’s because i have time now, in these stolen hours in which tree shadows stretch across the windows and outside, and the air is just starting to drape itself in cold and to exhale its fog into the golden streetlamp glow.
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October, 2024

Directions Home

My earliest childhood memory is of the herd of slow-rising hot air balloons over the Rocky Mountains. Every morning, my twin sister, Ava, and I would stand beneath the westward-facing window of our playroom and gaze towards the horizon as the
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October, 2024

Dragon boy

I get hungry, so I swim close to the surface. When fish are together, turning in tight patterns for no reason other than to be social, it’s called shoaling. Birds I have seen, when I lived on land, do the same
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October, 2024

Ark

All vessels have names, even a container ship whose utilitarian appearance does not elicit poetry. Ever Given. Blood oranges, mahogany, lemons,
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October, 2024

What it feels like to wake up and be gay for the first time in your life but also like the way you were supposed to wake up the whole time

There used to be a snag. It was in the chest and like a ponytail caught
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October, 2024

The Lasts of Her

A high-pitched staccato called out from the street behind, hawking kitchenware. Streets dotted with Durga puja pandals were in various stages of being undone. A few feet away, my mother’s rounded frame bent over a fruit cart, busy trying out little
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October, 2024

The Tricks Witches Play

You fattened the pigs in your stye with acorns and beech mast, And with a wave of your wand, you transformed them into men.
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October, 2024

The House Fire

“What?” I stammered, my head foggy from the Nyquil I’d taken a few hours before. The three kids and I had gotten in late, after a hectic week of skiing and the long drive from Colorado to Dallas. Somewhere around Denver,
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October, 2024

Hyphen Log

question mark-comma-hyphen marks punctuated by division upon division                         a leaving-behind
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October, 2024

Fanny Appleton Longfellow Predicts Her own Death

Lo! Were I a woman bottled and kept, written of as battles bloodied and blessed.
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August, 2024

Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels

Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally...
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August, 2024

Book Excerpt from Deccan Queen: Take Two

“Of course he’s not a fool, darling. He’s very clever. He works in a bank. He just likes Khurshed and wanted to show us that he knows about and eats foreign delicacies, and I suppose wanted us to think that it was quite expensive. He was trying to impress us,...
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August, 2024

Wake

Sundar’s voice had risen. His shawl had slipped into his lap. He sat there in the wind, in his torn vest. He appeared smaller and shrunk, his thin bones poked out of his shoulders like a sparrow’s. A single teardrop quivered at the end of his mustache. A part of...
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August, 2024

Ant Colony

You asked me how to kill An ant colony I told you to press firmly on each speck Until you thought they were no longer breathing,
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August, 2024

Jonestown

The jungle has reclaimed the camp, a bed of daisies growing now where the pavilion was. The oil drum stands rusting, its remembrance burnt away.
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