Deeya Bhattacharya writes

Claustrophobia

Pinned against a wall a moth flutters desperately. It isn’t his wall. I can wall up my desperateness well. His inadvertent fall might have been blue or green. Green relieves one's senses. My senses can build up octaves well. Octaves reveal themselves in blue arteries. They carry velvety red plush. I can carry flutters in my womb. My navel carries the carcass of my dreams. The embryonic fluid is disaster itself - dank disastrous waters. Italic dreams sizzle in the golden glue. Two swans mate in the acrylic waters. Its placid green spells carry hunger in them. The hunger of silk and glowworms. The loony moon nestles in the avid air. It cocoons in the soft mud of the heart raucous with echoes. The wounds turned septic. Nobody cares for a sceptic. I sell my wounds. I trade in boots, raisins and hiccups. Words choke my throat. I sell my flesh. I trade in death…….  



A corpse at  the Texas State Forensic Anthropology Center -- Roc Morin

Deeya Bhattacharya writes

Missing on a Weekend

Weekends are subterfuges in love, desire, pain. They are the extra toppings on the platter of life. Primroses bloom on Saturday evenings. Cigarette stubs flood Saturday evenings. They lie on ash-trays and etherize them. Mouth-watering delicacies arrive in baking and serving trays. A well-trimmed beard or a perfect bun witnesses frivolousness and gaiety. A Jay whistles nearby. Its mating call suits the ambience. The chopped air calls for celebration, the French-fried noon - can you celebrate denial. Can you play hopscotch with a million stars on a perfect night-sky. They stoop and rise to the rhythm of life.

                                                    Sundays are meant for figs and olives in oil. Wearing a tan is a jewel. Cooking stories of tulips, lettuce spinach blooms on a half-baked noon is sumptuous. Flurries and pastries join the row. Surrogate dreams come in sugar-brown candies that melt in the mouth. Dreams hibernate - I made you up in my mind - the world drops dead, stony eyes remain. I confide in them. Those stubborn dreams capsize…..my adulterous heart handles felony with care. 

Weekend Runaway -- Janine  Daddo

Deeya Bhattacharya writes

Tashi’s Revenge

Tashi breathes the mud of magic. The cold windy day translucently blows and his bones rattle against a tepid warmth hardly to be called skin. His life on a raw afternoon, when the wind heads for north, bustling trees quietened to tragedy. The blatant nights and the vindictive air chewed like the end of a cigarette butt ensure nothing. It hangs in the aisle, smug, full of imperfection. On countless nights, when the void breathed and lingered in earth’s womb the Satan pulsated in his veins. His beloved has been crumbled like fear tattooed in the folded layers of an ageing earth, of fallen leaves. His beloved rests in the myriad colours that impregnate the earth while the dewy morning softly croons in the lap of a dusky sky. The confluence of darkness and light. The itch persists. It devours his sanity. Early autumn mornings are a rarity for his insipid self. The distractions in his head quieten. He gurgles and spits out the rawness of his wound. The morning sedates him. In the mornings like these he could love life, an almond skin wrapped around, and Viagra in his blood raged, procreating a hunger for the silk. His intentions became clear and cruel. Now in these mornings he prepared to strike. After all it was justice done, it was the last rites that he could offer to pay to Myla. Her ashes blindfolded Tashi in the newly painted sky of a crimson morning.  

Deeya Bhattacharya writes

May's Retreat
   (On Tagore’s Birthday)

Rhythm of words do knock
your myriad mind
words rustle like dried leaves
that you wear as an anklet, they keep pace
they howl, they whistle
the notes of woody floral scents
scents of musk and dew rose
they sing in harmony, words painted
on the tree of Krishnachuda.

My mind’s tuned to spring
that is, withered and tired with day’s chores
it mixes with the cuckoo’s tunes and rejuvenates
it’s the murmur, the haunting of Chaitra noon
that smears all the buds blossoming with clear tangent light

The nor’-wester comes in fine garments
and new attitudes
comes the month that celebrates
the  Poet Tagore’s birth
it lingers in the footfall
the immortal works of him, finds justification
even today
we celebrate him, we celebrate him,
in the month of Baisakh, even today.

The days move on, unknowingly
the sorrows creep and peep in secrecy
unrevealed, they rustle and jostle
and embalmed with them the
little words have nice melodies to play
in the depth of the mind,
they create a harmony
like the uninterrupted flow
of  a river’s gurgling sprout

The slide, they glide abreast the current
of flowing thoughts
Do not waive, do not mock me
the wind’s heavy with charged motions
like a mirage it deflects --
do borrow some covenant from it
let them remain in your fond memories --
in seclusion let them retire
and replicate

Has the Sun in the new dawn
looked upon your face, has it impinged on you
kissed your brows?
Let you replenish your soul in the depth
and warmth of the green, green around you
Let  that be an awakening of our souls
Where you and I do greet and meet.

Krishnachuda (Delonix regia, Gulmohar), noted for its fern-like leaves and flamboyant display of flowers; also  known as the Flame Tree.
Chaitra: The 12^th month of the Bengali calendar 
Baisakh: The 1st month of the Bengali calendar 

 

[Deeya Bhattacharya's translation of the Bengali “kobir janmodin E chhonder  shobdera” by the same poet.]

Under The Shade Of The Flamboyant -- Zaira Dzhaubaeva

Deeya Bhattacharya writes

Fear

Fear is unknown; I’ve felt it in my fingers and toes. I backpack it in my nightmares. The devil’s face in sickening colours engulfs my shadow. Lilacs  hum a weedy tune. The livid oracle smears my porous skin. Running past tunnels of thick darkness, a magenta scream escapes my mouth. I relive the murky past. The surging clouds are snowflakes of agony. It drizzles. I can steer crystal clear. A pain is logged on my mother’s face, as she holds a dead foetus in skinny hands.Trees mourn-a deadening grief- an embryo of grief. The language of a rusty noon with shackles of sand is gritty. My mother rocks herself to sleep. Her muffled grief courts the dance of death. She repels my doomed thoughts. I squirm in it. The dread is a sepulcher of our fragrant dreams long lost in her hazel eyes. 


  Femme avec enfant mort II, Post-scriptum à Guernica (Mother with Dead Child II, Postscript to Guernica)-- Pablo Picasso


Guernica [detail] -- Pablo Picasso

Deeya Bhattacharya writes

Desperate Lies

   Always 

come to me in desolate nights

when I speak 

the language of

salt in the sea; 

of charcoal madness

of brine in my hair 

the distant cry of a seagull on foam

Oh! Come on, the years 

spilt on your shoulders and breast

of walnut madness 

of the pain

etched on my heart 

bleeding to the brim of a reluctant eye

The whining noon 

eavesdrops on the dead shores

of your eyes, it saunters along 

the purring lips, the

death of my cat is 

moon and madness to me

The girl with satin sachets 

auburn hair and peanut eyes

swaggering along 

speaks the Inca tongue

I see death in her hair 

pinned to her nape, moving

on her helpless knees 

begging for life

A Jacaranda sings on innocence 

of nestling birds; its

sturdy branches house 

love and myth that walk

the ocean of life.

 

 Under the Jacaranda -- Wissam Beydoun