Poem, Wild Birds in Nepal

Published in Deep Wild Journal: Writing from the Backcountry, Volume 2—2020

Indian poet Anannya Uberoi's reminder that (as Thoreau says) "there is more day to dawn":
    ... we must sleep well
to wake up in time to taste the tangible rays
of golden light as they lay gentle and godlike
upon the massive rubble of the earth.

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Available in print on the website.

Poem, Inventing Words

Published in The Bangalore Review, July 2020

condifluoia
/ˈkɒndɪfluːɪɑ/
noun: condifluoia; plural noun: condifluoia
1.
the specific scent of tea leaves in
boiling water when it soaks in six
strands of freshly grated ginger on the
hand-shredder

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Non Fiction, To Shimla, From Madrid

Published in LandLocked, Issue 2.2.

The memory of Kiplings Shimla has followed me to this most comforting, quaint little tea room. Mr. Ruskin Bond's words begin to refurbish the buff walls of the lonely corner with the coos and whistles of the nine-fifteen, the quail of a passing leopard, the stillness of the Himalayas where everything is set in motion.

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Available in print here.

Poem, Quarantine

Published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Issue 44, Spring 2020.

Backyards, town halls, lofts, back to their still, unmoving
states. Mothers knitting, children sleeping, cities ducked
in a silence of moons and moons of winter.

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Available in print here.

Two Poems

Published in Cypress Press, August 2020.

Grief begins with a feathered tail and
Newton’s wheel spinning over unmisted West
Highlands where wild herons fly with
muslin-plumes to ceiling-bright skies –

The bundled world is Rosacae, infected with
roses of thorns and apples of pride that
throw their seeds upon the fertile soil

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Poem, On the Subjugation of the Reader

Published in The Madras Courier.

We are books quartered into
flippant rants, didactic passages,
muddled poems, improbable clarity

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Two Poems

Published in Buddhist Poetry Review, Volume 3, Issue 4.

At the foot of the Dzong, the mind
is fortified, the heart is a sanctuary
of sympathetic joy, the prayer
on your lips begins to touch
high-flying swifts and needletails

In the Lama's house, the crow slumbers,
querulous ponies pause for bags of hay
and fountains recover their yearnings.

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Premonition

Published in San Antonio Review.

Before it rains in Langtang, the rain dolls pucker
their cotton lips, the satin-ribbed curtains blow
with the rumbling thunder, the shutters 

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Poem, A Textbook Afternoon

Published in Jaggery Lit: A DesiLit Arts and Literature Journal, Issue 15, Spring 2020.

I often tell you I dig things / sans / meaning: watching you / for hours,
open-mouthed, / in a safe haven of words / we create spontaneously /
without definitions and / poems that exist as / mere permutations of, / the afternoon: / sans / meaning, / sans / design, / sans / conversation.

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Two Poems

Published in The Blake-Jones Review.

after daytime distress has dried / like red sugar on our petty souls, the jagged / ecstasy from dust to dust dissolves in / our lungs at once for more breath.

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My mother speaks a language other than I. She was a francophone in her / Canadian childhood. I am not part of her elite vernacular assembly

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Non Fiction, The Secret Garden

Published in The Loch Raven Review, 2020.

Ulsoor Lake is visited by hundreds of river herons in the spring. By the end of June, the summer is peaking in Bangalore, and the lake is pigeonholed into clusters of black and spotted billed ducks that wade alongside the herons.

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Available in print soon.

Poem, my beautiful

Published in Clementine Unbound, August 2020.

my mouth runs like a mulberry tree against
a derelict window, vowel-keen, swanning,
hushing into a low branch by the brindled
ledge. I shed my greased hair in canals of
salt chuck and landfills of boomburbs;

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Poem, Clockwork

Published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Number 38.

The clockwork’s clunking cycles—
routine chirrups working with
our own, mechanical metronome
dictating our waking and falling
and drifting in staccato synchrony.

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Available in print here.

Poem, a winter in delhi

Published in Marías at Sampaguitas. I was nominated for Best of Net, 2020, for this work.

the cold comes in waves like the pleats of nani’s gold-bordered kancheepuram saree gently bracing the grass as she moves in the garden clearing up crumbled leaves and paper daisies to make room for bushes of hollyhocks

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Poem, Darkroom

Published in Ayaskala Literary Journal, May Mini Issue.

My husband says, the shadow of the spine is twisted, not the spine
itself. The bone is growing eucalyptus and redwood pines at the epicenter of the rotation of
the earth. So much is happening in the morning before pancakes—

Available in print here.
Read the review here.

Non Fiction, Rosé

Published in Ayaskala Literary Journal, September Issue.

The hush of the mountain deafens us. The visiting cat leaves through the open shutter—he has places to be. We like to think he is better off in the wild woodlands, where the troubles of the mind subside.

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Three Poems

Published in The Banyan Review, Issue 2.

After colors have flowered, / embryos woven shapes, / and cemented rocks forced into the running rill;

Bowed, handheld floret against a dusk of posies – / flowers dying, / flowers blooming, / flowers knotted in a mesh of green stems kissing tastefully for the camera.

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Poem, Lines

Published in Plum Tree Tavern.

Poem, A Homeward Letter

Published in Stone of Madness Press.

Mother, I am well.
The city’s gardens are a mild aphrodisiac
to grey winter mornings adding turmoil
in my tea pot, flower pot, storm stirring
in my backyard of things.

The evenings come with
secret hunts of flies; I often mull over events
on the headlines and hide tiny wasps in the slip

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Water Caltrops in Autumn

Published in Uppagus, Issue 42.

At eight, I sat in a puddle
of broken twigs and rioting hens, dreaming of planes
dispensing honeysuckles to our arctic circle of barrenness.

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Poem, An Utter Lack of Birds

Published in Analogies & Allegories Literary Magazine, Issue I: Transformation.

By your grave I saw waxwings in the southern hemisphere,
changing.
I followed forks of birdtracks on the naked grass; came for
your primroses stamped in stone to warn me that downy
woodpeckers back in the hoary treehouse
are still hunting for holes in barks.

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Available in print here.

Experimental Poem, pinwheels

Published in Streetcake Magazine, Issue 68, Part 2.

you took my ƒrail hands twirling
twiddling in the midst of sometimes
sun-stroked sometimes moon-lined

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Poem, May, Madrid

Published in Sienna Solstice, An Antidisciplinary Publication, Issue I.

Light-hearted bluebells upturn the May glum.
Long queue at the grocer's today. "Pick some
kidney beans for me, dear?"

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Poem, My Body is a Barrelhouse

Published in Riggwelter Press.

of shattered glass and wasted wine, dartboards of
missed shots hung proud upon her iron walls.
She houses weary feet that punch her varnished
floor with puddles of fresh rainwater, runaways from

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Poem, On Poetry

Published in The River Bird Magazine.

A poem is the sanctum where
the gnomic utterance of the most primal
human notion meets language;

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Two Poems

Published in Antonym, June 2020 Issue.

We keep sipping on crystal ware, tumblers coffee mugs,
pitchers, kettles — cafés these days
are creative with crockery.

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Two Poems

Published in Lux Lucet Zine, Issue 1.

Available in print here.

Two Poems

Published in Twist in Time Literary Magazine, Issue 9.

Sunday, 10 a.m.
the boulevards of Munich
branch out into tiny alleys
bustling with carpets and
candies for Oktoberfest,
Hans Zimmer is playing
on the radio as Ms. Emilia ...

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Poem, Lesson Plan

Published in Nightingale & Sparrow, Schoolhouse, Issue No. VII.

I make tea during lunch hour, you joke around with the girls
while I stir a honey-dipped sugar-coated spoon in
the paper cup, going over and over the colored pages
of our exercise book.

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Available in print here.

Two Poems

Published in The Kraken's Spire, Volume 3.

Drums cry and love hangs / upon a lonely bulb, /
the night beginning its / filthy fatal vengeance /
distinguishes drab from / obsessive kisses

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Poem, A Sunday

Published in The Luna Collective, Summer II Zine.

Read here.
Available in print here.

Poem, Roam

Published in Tea and Cake Magazine, Issue 1.

Available in print here.

Three Poems

Published in Literary Yard.

McLeodganj does not know the nature of / wounds within these displaced men, and / to what degree their pacific smiles / justify their cause.
Wee hours like these, when poets / reappear in carousels of love, loss and / worship churning around the streets of / a town of temples;

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Fiction, Growing Up

Published in eFiction India, Volume 4, Issue 8.

Available in print on the website.

Three Poems

Published in Lapis Lazuli—An International Literary Journal, Volume 7, No. 1, Spring 2017.

You love, as the warm lilac of
Eurasian heather in moorlands
fragile, free
under downward blowing winds
that whisk across.

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