Poetry
POETRY / The creek drank the sorrows you sang to
Rose-tinted glasses are just red, and I have painted myself with the color now that the hollow of your eyes isn’t there, now that
POETRY / Hazardous miasma
The night smoke carries out the riots of innocents,
POETRY / Silent friday
Somehow, the taste of tear gas
POETRY / Jabar bela fele jeo ekti khopar phul
Leave a flower from your bun when you depart, my love.
POETRY / Swapane eshechilo mridubhashini
Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam
POETRY / Survival tactics for “peaceful” protests
Stay in a group, never in alleyways
POETRY / Look out the windows
In the blanks of muddy moonlight
POETRY / Magic boys and girls of Bangladesh
Magic boys and girls of Bangladesh, I love you.
POETRY / All hail July
The July wind brought in the scent of new beginnings
Rebel is a letter in red
Where voices unite, a chorus strong, / Demanding justice, righting wrong
The three day wake
‘You must bury / yourself / Every three days’ / She said, / ‘Corpses are of / No use
Lone house around the bend
Your grief rots the decades old paint and the lakhri no one bothered to replace. Even across the road, it reeks of death.
Monsoon osmosis
I inhale the luxurious scent / of squelched earth / smoking under the sodden leaves
Colours
Echoes of your voice ring in my ears / As the world turns scarlet in front of my eyes
Wonder
I feel my rage, ma, a living thing;/ A beast, caged, like me
All that I’d despicably known / Things I wish I didn’t know
All that I’d despicably known / Things I wish I didn’t know–
Omniscient
Skin sticky with perspiration from a long month of June
All that I shouldn’t have known
What I wish I didn’t know is that when your dear friends whisper the word “psycho” behind your back, you’ll grow up accepting it.
The things I wish I had never known
I skip talking to myself for hours / The “me time”, before going to bed
