Cover Image: painting by Ratko Lalic: Zapis 2, 2017.g, 140x140cm, acrylic on canvas, photo by © Valdimir Lalić
Shoulders
All my poems read the same.
Same old braids of anxiety tied with schoolgirl ribbons.
Those dreams, a jar full of amla
waiting to slide down your hair and shake off heat from your head.
This time, I wrote about my shoulders,
You know they are rock stiff.
The region suddenly turned into a deciduous forest,
smelling of leaves and fresh earth.
A stream ran by.
I wanted to start afresh,
to bear fruit and flowers without longing.
I watered myself with a spraying can.
Never having the guts to paint myself red or orange.
Or blue, as I saw a man long, long ago.
Rubbing my back with ointment, I brushed my roots, branches, leaves…
Knitted those wrong nerves into a scarf
Covered my face with light
and prepared to sleep.
Real Estate
The poems I wrote last week
are adorable.
Just like those modestly built houses in our locality.
With a standard yellow exterior,
they open their doors and windows to the same old maps of lack and longing.
Pieces of furniture towering over their space, the way they eat, sleep and wait.
Let me switch to first person.
My poems look like those pale yellow quarters.
My poems live in all those buildings.
Monotonous and ungainly
Dreamy and imprudent
Obstinate, youthful?
The real estates I have.
Neat set of questions and answers in a row.
Ghum[1], Sleep
Ghum
Dewy guavas in the fridge.
A monosyllabic world of curtains drawn.
Girls cycling to school early morning.
That spoon of light I gulp down and shut my eyes again.
‘Light is like Water’, Marquez said it.
Sleep
A silver fortress I want to enter.
Sentries of hygiene at its gate.
The queen, who cancelled my appointment years ago.
The prince teaches a new dance step every night.
The carpet I roll up at midnight, the videos I snack on.
The sleepless playlist in my larynx.
I am dancing on the bed.
There’s too much light, but syrupy darkness at the end of the tunnel.
[1] Ghum means sleep in Bengali.
Paulami Sengupta is an editor and translator based in Kolkata. Her poems (in English and
Bengali) and translations have been published in Indian Literature, Aro Anondo, Ebong
Jalghari, Matchbox by Usawa and a few other magazines. Her recent collection of Bengali
poems (under her pen name Anjashi) is titled Bayosandhir Haraf (Boibhashik, 2021). Her
first collection of poems in English, Maximum Love in Patel Nagar (Red River), was published
in 2023. She is also a member of the editorial team at Red River.
