Poem: For Asifa
By Rimli Bhattacharya
I write for Asifa,
I hold a pen,
As my daughter sleep besides me.
Poem: Kashmir on Cards
By Bilal Yousuf
That a card is a card no more.
It is a part, integral.
Indispensable.
Like brain and bladder.
You forget spleen at home?
Ever?
Liver in the cupboard?
Poem: Reference
By Gaurav J. Pathania
But in the academic world
A reference is your existence
which is endangered
If you are not referred to.
Where else does one live
But in citations?
Three Poems
By Shobhana Kumar
Today, I learn that growing old
is not always graceful,
that the shrivelling will get me,
and no sunshine, water or love
can withhold the withering.
Three Poems
By Linda Ashok
I have been busy complimenting
strangers on the footpath
and proposing to store-keepers
how poetry can really glam up
their interiors.
Four Poems
By Fatima Zehra
loving you came in
pieces; empty glances,
broken promises, and everything in
between.
Poem: For Madhu
By Sumit Ray
Did you go back and eat?
Or were you full
after having human meat?
Book Review: Kiriti Sengupta’s ‘Solitary Stillness’
By Amit Shankar Saha
it is not surprising if there is an intersection, if not altogether a confluence, of Eastern and Western traditions in the practice of Indian writers in English, too, who curiously inherit both the traditions through the mediations of colonial and global cultures one after the other. In this context if we read Kiriti Sengupta’s latest release, Solitary Stillness, which is a book of aphoristic verses and prose poems, we are indeed reading an example of the said intermingling.
Poem: For Asma Jahangir
By Rimli Bhattacharya
I am scared, she is not;
I cried, she laughed;
I was beaten, so was she;
I broke down, she stood up.
Two Poems
By Mekhala Chattopadhyay
One day, we shall become the comics
At the end of the page,
Which goes unnoticed by grand ideas.
Poem: My Ode to Kamala Surayya
By Chandramohan S
But Google-doodle
Entombs her maiden name,
Shrouded in archaic veil!
An interview with poet, Aditi Angiras
By Chandramohan S
The other is where they shun you for using art as activism, for turning poems into propaganda. The literary community is very neoliberal like that, it’s a market, they’ll sell whatever can get sold. For everything else, there’s the master card. Then they tell you what qualifies as poetry and what doesn’t, and if they’re gonna let you in to the academy or not.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 