The Day Before I very well remember when my sky-blue shirt got its first big tear and started its career as my new rag. I don’t remember the days when it wiped my floor by daylight and crouched like a mouse at night in a dark little alcove behind the door shut tight. I still remember its colour pale from sky-blue to bone-white its body lose my shape its knitting thin till the floor could be seen through its boneless skin. I do not remember the day it vanished but clearly remember the day before – my sky-blue shirt while trying to clean was dirtying my floor.
The Morning After My father likes his rice boiled hard. At dinner, he picks up his steel plate drops a grain and strains his ear to listen to a soft thud. If he hears, he smiles. Otherwise he gets up, washes his fingers and goes off to sleep. In winter, before the sun is up, before the first sparrow chirps through our paling ventilator, after the dew have stopped dropping from the grooves in our tin roof to their graves in the moist earth, the iron gate creaks in the dark dawn breeze and I hear, ‘Ma is nowhere. Daddy, ma is nowhere.’
A Division with a Remainder In my quest for an escape I was inspired by an amoeba which does not die but at death divides itself and vanishes in two new amoebas. Then I saw a baby die and the mother hold her womb and cry and realized – deaths like births are goodbyes, births like deaths are escapes, pain though has no place to go so, it remains with the remainders.
A Shape of Water Like the soft brown stalk of the arum filled with sap from the puddle beneath its feet stooped by a single raindrop on its only heart-shaped leaf, my body is a shape tears and blood gave me.
Flight Some flies sit on the rim of the bowl and eat some sit on the food while eating some scoop down smear soup on their wings and lick what sticks. Some soups need the drinker to sink. Some flies like Christ walk on soups with nimble feet.
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Kingshuk Sarkar’s poems have appeared in ‘Palette Poetry’, ‘Stringtown Magazine’ and ‘Northwest Boulevard’ and translations (from Bengali to English) have appeared in ‘Circumference’, ‘Exchanges’, ‘Visions International’, ‘Kritya’, ‘The Antonym Magazine’, and is forthcoming in ‘Modern Poetry in Translation’. Kingshuk Sarkar lives Kolkata, India.