The Tenth Edition of Life and Legends is a team effort and the labor of love. I want to thank our new team members, Lopa Banerjee and Megha Sood, for diligently working side by side with me to pick the finest pieces of prose and poetry, and Nirvan Chitnis for presenting everything elegantly on our…
Forgiveness, I Am Eclipsed forgiveness, exploding stars, breaths,Faithful embers in the midst of shadows.Forgiveness at our fingertipsCaptured by the smoke ofA train travelling down tracks,Past the house where I lived,With a piano where I prayWith my fingertipsOf forgiveness,And let colors immobilize meIn a world of sound. I have walked down the highway,Feet dragging,Without a coat…
Supplies I Will Require Before Seriously Considering the Job *Forthcoming in Dear Selection Committee (JackLeg Press, May 2022) _____ Family Tree My mother was a lake ………… full of water lilies, my father was a bridge………… between the bardo and heaven. He tossed me………… to his shoulders for the parade of grandparents………… at night: Orion…
A Bucket of Hot Water and Salt
Conscious of my blessings where water poured out of a tap
Even if for two hours a day, the man with the camel skin bags was ready, if it didn’t, I passed the *ghamelas full of mud from the top of the hill, Down the assembly line to the bottom, Baked in the sun, and exhausted in every limb I returned home to water and love.
We rarely meet someone so genuine, radiating, and accomplished as an individual and professional like poet, novelist, and professor Melissa Studdard. I came in contact with Melissa Studdard through social media and read her work for the first time when I published her poems in Life and Legends. I immediately felt a connection with the…
Awakening The incidence of flightwithin flightwas, for crow,an audacity unspoken.Dreams of this plague,a prelude anticipating hope.For crow, the truth,unvarnished as truth’s manifesto, was lostin winged translation. Lostin archives,where hope trained in narrative,crow deferred to truth,at times, when truth was allhe had, obscure—reminded himof living,tasks, of the vital and the vincible—but oh, crow longed for the daywhen pursued by the very…
The struggle to give everything away Inside the ferry’s heartbeat, we fold ourselves like prayers, sheathed in metal, plastic and flesh, part animal, part technology, it is the thoughts that rise like snapping turtles, rocked by the Aegean green. I want this to be the end of it, a wounded winter amidst the very summer…
Nocturnal Fear I listen to the smooth rowing of his breathfrom one shore to the other side of dreams,consciousness, a gently rhythm of sloshingwater fills the bedroom like music. I panic when it deviates its coursethe lengthy pause of a median size rock.I fear the boat not reaching its destination,getting stucked in the middle of…
One Day I Am A Field Instantly, soundlessly, a meadow called bereft.……………One day, a hawk’s meadow. Above, a red-tailed hawk fools meinto thinking he’s an eagleflaps his wings wildly then glides until I know, yes, it is you. What is remembered when blinded?Try to wake to the sun’s flash of denial.……………The problem: I am grief’s…
T S Eliot is Traditional Now The sea waves iced………..on the ledge I saw……………….Eliot chopping it —-Though hardly I noticed The sea skulls were………..bobbing up in leftover……………….of stale breath. A square hole was in my chiseled chest– Spoons knives forks of………..my modern cutlery……………….Are hung in kitchen –Though my ancestors cooked in Iron cauldron. In breakfast…
Insignificant wanderings I have left the sea at the parched door of oblivionWhere your eyes stood to receive my empty eyes. Words have meanings only if we knowHow to listen to the sky when a lightning strikes.To listen is to completely disown yourselfLike the leaves at the end of a rain. I have left the…
Magic Eye When you catch my eye, I take off my glasses. That way, there’s nothing between us. Sometimes, I like thingsto be not too distinct, like an impressionist painting. Lightand color and mood more important than detail. I collectCatholic kitsch, telling myself it’s ironic. St. Lucy with her eyeson a plate. Baron Samedi with…
