Four Poems
By Rohith
is mother’s vagina a cliff
from which the infant tumbles
and falls throughout its life?
For Olafur and Nils
By Goirick Brahmachari
And the creatures of the night
They sniff dendrite by the cold alleys
Ragpicking dreams in sacks of dead black
Crows and filth.
Two Memories
By Tikuli
I breathe deeply, eyes closed,
inhale the aromas that we once shared,
the crackling warmth of wood stove,
the tang of our salt-laced bodies.
Three Poems
By Archita Mittra
all words are only a black-faced pretext
to fill up the
e m p t y
s p a c e s
in the dusty, abandoned
parking lots of your heart.
Five Poems
By Mary Ann Chacko
Like the safety of a garbage dump to a street dog beaten and left to die,
So is poetry to me;
A place to lick my wounds.
Four Poems
By Goirick Brahmachari
The smoky roof has given up. It leaks memory drop by drop
On to my sink. The staircase is
Breaking, falling apart. Insects
Have taken over the corridor.
Five Poems
By Debarun Sarkar
Sharmila,
Its time you stopped fasting
and validating the state.
Two Poems
By Anubhav Majumdar
In darker days
In colder nights
In us holding
Not just our hands
But our lives.
Three Poems
By Omair Bhat
In the streets, filled
with impenetrable smoke,
Kashmir is burning again,
so are tyres, rubber,
and logs.
Three Poems
By Poornima Laxmeshwar
I am the river with a snake in my womb,
I prey on your hunches,
I am a linear with no variables,
I am made up of my ocean with disobedient waves,
I am the guilt that comes with pleasure.
Three Poems
By Yash Pandit
I hold you as one holds a shadow; in my eyes,
I lose you between the flickers of light
And darkness. The radio screams,
“Don’t persist on leaving today.”
Book Review: Charles Ades Fishman & Smita Sahay’s ‘Veils, Halos & Shackles’
By Rashida Murphy
This anthology is a sustained call for an intellectual and emotional uprising. It situates the reader at the heart of violence against women without ever seeming shrill or censorious. Veils, Halos & Shackles was conceived as a response to the brutal gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey on a bus in Delhi in 2012.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 