Featured poem in "Durable Goods 28"

EVENING THINGS is featured in Durable Goods issue 28, published by Aleathia Drehmer, poet and publisher from Upstate NY.

I think a lot about the home we left behind in Guwahati, Assam. My parents moved from there, and with it a large chunk of our childhood and growing up years.

DG 28 is only in print. Read the poem below:

Evening Things

By Nabina Das

5 p.m. The trees invite blue china clouds

They forget the sun cannot light the lamp

5 p.m. You are drinking tea with honey

Inside a penumbra by the Radhachuda tree

You can wait, then bring the oil lamp out

Circumnavigate the non-existent tulaxi

The Namghar’s 5 p.m. silence will soon erupt

Its tranced kortaal dueting with the khol

5 p.m. You will know that time has struck

Gooseberry dreaming the shadow of a home.

NOTE: I realize there are some words in the poem that are not from the English language and hence need explaining. However, I don't like giving glossary.

Image from my photo album

Non-fiction Piece published in BAP Quarterly

When I wrote it down recently, I thought this non-fiction piece of mine read more like a story. It is one no doubt, considering how dramatic real life could get for some people. And I find myself going back to such themes again and again, whether in essay or poetry -- the quest for defining borders, the urge to un-map oneself and the discovery that confines are within our own minds.

THE WATER GIVER is published in the current issue of Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly. The theme for this edition is "New York City". Exciting, innit!

Here's an excerpt:

"He had seen us through the crowd. Lunch time. A 15-course buffet and the smell of mustard oil I cannot miss. Jackson Heights is an ant hill of colors – white, brown, black. White faces, black arms, brown legs. The United Colors of Humanity flag flapping in the glee of an autumn New York breeze of 2007.

He has worked under the roof of this un-glitzy Bangladeshi restaurant for decades now. He has hummed Amar Shonar Bangla in the beginning over cauldrons of boiling oil or milk, dreamed of dazzling green paddy, and then slowly forgotten everything. His education was meager, not enough to earn him a stable job back home in a newborn nation. But the money to the middleman “bhai” was just what he could pay for a better life as a New Yorkistani. After all, there was no family, no ties. Why even stick around to be prodded by the police and hear comments from the neighborhood maulavi for not having grown his beard long enough?"

Hope you have fun reading it. For the direct link, go here.

Image: BAP Q cover "Worship Me" by Farras Abdelnour

"Redness" wins a prize

It was nice to know I was awarded the 1st prize for my entry "REDNESS" by the UNISUN-Reliance poetry contest. That poem is special to me.

Here's the text:

Redness

The summer storm bloomed on an eastern sky

the west looked red

roses of anger heaped on a bush stuck in its thorns

smarting faces, hatred.

**

You were watching Caché in the living room TV

blood squirting from slashed up necks

headless chickens scattered in an ungainly race

backwards, forward, again back.

**

My finger touched a tomato skin shedding light

of a red ink, darklike –

wasn’t this what my father’s revolutionary friends

brought in, a newspaper wrapped tight

**

So not everyone would know how words tumble

red and angry on our roads?

I thought I saw a word flutter open again, a hue,

not a name or mundane things like odes.

**

You thought we’d lost our tongues, our attitude

piled under the redness of shame

peripheral to storms, deaths, news of constant ruse

and I realized, a color doesn’t need a name.

(By the way, someone asked with chagrin why I enter contests and I said, "To pay my bills". That is partly true. I want to break even one day and take a cruise somewhere. Is that bad? At least I don't want my poetry to be just read in tiny groups that'll only say "awww". I want poetry to sit in the bazaar and yell and gesture at passers-by... Ah, okay.)

Image from Internet: pop art