Postcard - Untitled   Before Mark Rothko As the floor gives way, I’m a bird always burning up in the desert. Every few years, I tear off my layers. I eat the ashes of predecessors. I’m the torment of cells, neural connections. I’ve learned the...

      Union This marriage was not meant to happen, too hasty,  driven by needing to make everything right.  Late night urge to clean my grandmother's saucepans, to rekindle how it was to be hearthside with her. Too keen and desperate,  now look at the...

      Dangerous Bird She wanted grace. she wanted to feel her limbs lightweight to know flight without wings where light was dim & bass louder than bodies hitting ground. she once saw her body hitting ground purposefully, carefully planned &...

content warning: gynaecological examination     Naming of Parts                                        (after Henry Reed)   Today we have naming of parts.                        Yesterday we had no idea they would need to be named. Two students avoid my...

      Door I opened the door A girl stood there her blonde hair drifting in the wind She said My mother told me not to go to the mountains she said there is nothing to eat in the mountains and she said I will get lost in the mountains and I will slip...

      Diaspora I lost both my lovely uncles one after the other to another country. Jubilantly they had passed their examinations and once equipped with white coats and certificates they poised to join the gloried institutions only to find corridors...

      Melt If a white bear’s weight tilts the floe where once he stood in balance with the ice― If he opens himself to a barely discernible scent of seal but it drifts off like sleet― If a bear pads the asphalt of a seaside town sallowed by streetlight...

      Without you I won’t believe in ghosts but the day after they told me you had died, I saw you everywhere we had been. Not there in that dark garden shed with me as I built a gate, that startlingly first bright day of early summer but in India, that...

      Paper Dolls She did well, my secret twin – kept us alive, deflected blows, absorbed each wound into our body, quiet as a tree. I didn’t notice her leave until the wind whistled in and a bird flew from my mouth. Later I unfolded myself like a chain...