Terrace
The crow perches on the mast of the terrace
sailing in the waters of my womb.
The wind battered clothes sway on the clothesline
This is how air digests wind.
The blue and yellow water tankers
are stamps of houses collected by telescopic eyes of a philatelist.
It is from here that screams of loss and triumph emanate after every cricket match or hide and seek.
The silent beat of thudding, racing footsteps
keep track of one another through the echo-locomotion of absences.
It is teeming with faces of people I do not want to grow with.
But this space should hold water in my next births;
in times when my mind is a vacant terrace like one of those vulnerable, dilapidated houses of Calcutta
The Mulch
I uproot the plants
Pumpkins, bittergourd, tomatoes, pui shaak (Malabar spinach)
The tendrils roll around your clawed sclerotic fingers
The wet earth smells of your pillows and unwashed dressing gowns
you changed so often in Calcutta and Delhi summers
I used to tell myself that I was born in that sweat – the water in your womb
Now they keep the plants alive in the scorching Delhi heat
The earth forms creases from the forehead of the Himalayan lumber-collector
The English proverbs you taught me brew in the tea I make for myself
that I drink in your blue-pottery cup
The tendrils rise
to clutch you
Only to lose the grip
in your stunned pilgrimage to disappearance.
Is grief edible?
This is not ending
I am eating rice
In the constant squish of starch
inside my mouth
the mountain stream runnels down
in the buttoned silence of the night.
A small nameless bird
hops to the tip of the branch
of the nameless tree
A rat tears the potato sack
in the warehouse.
A pavement dweller
counts the threads of his tattered sleeping rug.
A dog barks
at the clothes waving on the clothesline
The dead sleep with the living as well
Ultrasonic thoughts enter the dream
blowing wind on the dread
The clouds drift away from this sight,
ceaselessly
without any refrigeration in the beholder’s eyes
how many births does it take for a cloud
to make them matter to the firmament?
how many times should I chew food
to make edible my grief?
Minne (Memory in Swedish)
Memory is a fire tender
Scaling up facades
Rescuing anecdotes, whims, a sight, a lover, a hard bone betrayal
From the blaze in the hippocampus.
Memory is a gurgle inside the mouth
Swishing agony
inside the whirl of motivated past.
Each life inside the mouth-cave
is a bird at night
ending its restlessness to fly.
Memory is a froth
The newest bubble snaps the previous
In the bartender mix
Of a sentiment tucked in pretence.
Memory is a rain-dyed road
Phalanges of wet leaves
leading us to green fingerprints
of things that are unlikely
yet so endearing.
Warp and Weft of Tears
There is no water
Grief is stillborn
A lasting fatigue, a dampness
held by mandibles of dilapidated houses.
Nothing would leak.
It gathers to form a bobbin,
And the spool of tears unfurls never-ending, fitting no textile of the mind
The warp and weft are lines of desperate reconciliations,
Only to be tangled in poorly woven irretrievable knots of fibre.
Born and raised in Kolkata, Pushpanjana Karmakar Biswas has contributed poems to magazines like The Harvest Millennium, Kritya, and Poetry India: Enchanting Echoes (All India Poetry Competition), Coldnoon Poetics and one piece of fiction to Indian Review. She currently works as a corporate lawyer in Delhi. She is also a part of a poetry group Moonweavers in Delhi. She has one upcoming publication in Kitaab journal.In pursuit of discovery of the core of a human heart, she likes to portray the unspeakable wrench seated in the souls of a human being in the backdrop of overflow of superficial catharsis on the internet in respect to human relationships, loss and resuscitation.
