BIO
Usha Akella has authored four books of poetry, one chapbook, and scripted/produced one musical drama. Her latest poetry book was published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest Literary authority in 2019. She recently earned an 2018 MSt. In Creative Writing from Cambridge University, UK. She read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Indian English Poets.
She was selected as a Creative Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2019 & 2015. She has been published in numerous Literary journals, and has been invited to prestigious international poetry festivals in Romania, Canada, Slovakia, Nicaragua, Macedonia, Colombia, Slovenia, India etc. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala’ the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US. She has won literary prizes (Nazim Hikmet award, Open Road Review Prize and Egan Memorial Prize and earned finalist status in a few US based contests), and enjoys interviewing artists, scholars and poets for reputed magazines. She has written a few quixotic nonfiction prose pieces published in The Statesman and India Currents.
She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes, hospitals. Several hundreds of readings have reached these venues via this medium. The City of Austin proclaimed January 7th as Poetry Caravan Day.
The repetition of it in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere…
Every day I lose a part of me,
I am sprinkled about with bodies in some country,
like charred logs of wood we lie,
my intestines become smoke howling in the sky,
I am a scream from a raped woman’s throat,
I am washed up on some shore without a shoe,
I am a child living in a house of wire,
a fish suffocating in water,
a bird that cannot fly.
I move about without fingers on some days,
some days without a head,
and always the heart hangs by a thread,
not sure whom or what to pump for
I join the living dead.
I am Hindu, I wear orange,
I am Muslim, I wear green,
I am a nun cloistered in a forgotten dream,
I am a man loving a woman,
A woman loving a woman,
A woman loving a man,
And whatever color I wear or whatever prayer I say,
Whomever I love or lie with,
there’s always ‘the other’ who will torch me till I am bone.
I join the living dead, a stone,
On the Broken Line
And the days can stream
like a row of black piano keys,
Make a kind of music with no relief,
And upon us, a quiet despair
staples the days.
Our patina dreams, and our prayers
come, but come as shadows of light,
A quiet shriek, black flags on the
heart’s terrain,
_____hyena headlines.
_____We are devoured daily,
And in this palimpsest of pain,
We soon forget our sighs have reached the heavens,
and what seems all too late,
Suddenly,
On the broken line,
a new poem begins
to write itself,
And this, we call Grace.
Rise
(for Turkish women at the Raindrop Center)
The air has the color of courage,
the table waits like a country to be taken,
the room is a manuscript of many longings.
The spices of new names and ingredients flounce
their skirts, toss their heads and make grand entrances:
Börek, Ay çöreği, Lahmacun, Sumak, Peynirli poğaça, Kalburabastı.
In the womb of round-bottomed glasses honey colored chai serenely asks:
Where do we come from, how are we here, who are we?
Quietly, the flour waits the modest mistress of them all, her
age unknown, old crone of eons, her cheeks are unblemished.
“I am going to make the most powerful food,”
Saltik says smile warm as the inside of an oven,
She’s in charge, and—her mother, grandmother
singing ancient chants and hushed lullabies
speaking the language of bread through her,
soon the women’s fingers
like tapping heels, dancers in a row,
heads bobbing like Valentine bouquets
like pianists, they tap tap and fly,
like drummers, they pound,
they make the flour sing like mermaids to a shore,
they cajole, plead, pound, reap and meet,
tease and toss, the flour surrenders,
these fingers know, yes, they know,
wordless secrets flow,
in this room where people slip in and out
of the fingers of many countries,
the air watches as water with a silent tow,
the fingers glow,
with the secrets of what makes things rise,
what makes things live, what can quench
our thirsts, and hungers, the things women know
that pass down quietly through
the blood century upon century…
as if they know that Time too is like this—
flaky fillo sheets and a life in the end
is what happens between the layers,
what we fill it with, the appetite with which we bake it
makes it, rise.
******
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