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Grand or small, neat or dusty, they sneak in,
Set up guard anywhere we meet and deal.
Rock, wood, metal or plastic, they stay on,
Mute go-betweens, once the masters sit down

He sees us through the canvas gauze
of scrubland grass and crusts of soil,
as if those wind-swiped miles of sand are palettes, scratching at our souls.

This one poem is for you

Unlike the others,
you didn’t come to me as a picture of
perfection,
strength.

I’ll break you
Breaking, I will enter you
Will measure your mass
Your length and breath
Breaking the limits of your consciousness
Will walk inside you
Will find out if after being broken

Missing persons cast no shadows.
They don’t leave used dishes in the sink,
nor square bits of body soap,
nor toothbrushes that have flowered slightly
nor notes declaring love, etc., on the fridge.
But growth, and all sorts of things,
are possible in the life

whether this is a feat
under the tropic of cancer
or a defeat
is hard to tell
the broken path beneath
rises through the patchwork
of smoothness
towards a heart-wrenching
calling

My anger is your slave
It’s loyal to you
Like I once was
And like

You should have been to me

My anger wants

To run around in the open

The underwear of Rubi Gupta had not dried out
On the day the Jalianwala Bagh massacre took place.
While gathering clothes, hung them out to dry Up in the concrete roof

s matched by the speckled moth’s nervous
fluttering against the fluorescent bar light.

I watch mesmerised waiting for a taxi
to take me to the Siddhi
Vinayak Temple.

Shilpa Venky

She points to the sparkling night sky
stretched tight across space

And with her little fingers screams,
“Moon”.

“Moon”, “Moon”, she says