The trident lightning arrestor looks more constant than before— besieged by discomfort, bygone joys and pain—a belief flowing endlessly into the future.

In Kolkata, heat arrived as silence, thick, smothering. The days clung to us, draped like wet cloth, the evenings stitched with the hum of cicadas, their voices dense, layered, as if holding the weight of something breaking.

If you visit my mother’s village there is nothing much to see. There is a banyan older than my great-grandfather’s thoughts, a few houses older than a few cities, a temple older than my mother and boundless rice fields larger than the dreams of the farmers there.

I'm perched on a branch of my heart, like a question. Letters summon me— Why now, this flux of families And a city of the sun Beneath?

The woman I don’t recognize is back in my bed. She quotes Tolstoy.

Nothing wakens faster than a drowsy dog sussing, through an open window, the stabbing screams of an animal,

The closer I peered at the photo, the more the images retreated. A glimpse into the past, like a black-and-white retro montage.

I used to walk home from school before they had to build the bigger school because life then was brimming with children and everything was a Cat Stevens song

The rain won't stop seems to have gone on all my life

The crab approaches the drenched body of the albatross warily, as if familiar with this species, as if suspicious of death.

i get off the bus. & a cherry popsicle is flung at me. it explodes into red pieces all over my pink ita backpack

Saturday - white wine to a whiter shade of pale and dark petit fours, I lift English landscapes from sappy memories

Just when the evening turns to night – There is a word the wise ones say It speaks itself when all the birds Have sung away the last of day

For a week, maybe more, I’ve had a cough that won’t leave punctuating my days with dragon’s fire. The pain performs ballets of lightning, blooming, reminding me I’ve not been careful with my seasons.

She of the long flowing hair cascading like the river 22 stories below telescopes far on the avenue where humans skitter along

The full moon Through my kitchen window Turns the kitchen floor to light, No any-so-shining silver world By day, however bright

When twilight finds you by the sea and memory tears collect renounce the tide that has taken me.

Can you love me laissez-faire when the path leads to and fro and not succumb to daily wear?

Here is the bed where I can’t sleep and there’s the desk where I can’t write, abandoned papers in a heap.

A cleverer student would remember Milton’s voice a line of iambs marching free, an ego perhaps from God’s own lips.