Selection from How I remember You Is How the Page Flips, Red River, 2024
ECHO
You extract my skin
from cochineal insects.
You would say from your vantage point,
every echo is a misleading presence.
The eucalyptus branch collapses on your tabletop.
You close the door
to examine it.
I will tell you what a storm is.
When air starts feeling the barbed wire
and there are tears drumming behind your eyelids.
You sit at your desk
trying to defeat the sound of a conch shell
being blown from a far-away home.
EPHEMERA
You have lost much,
even a stomach rumbling is company.
People pulsate within the heart of onions.
A summer afternoon road scorches inside you.
Forgetting is a conquest.
Collect the shoal of shadows from the bougainvillea tree.
You know fitness lies in skyscrapers.
You know how heart is an insect
singing
in the forest of destiny.
EVERYTHING STRUGGLES FOR A MEANING
Today’s rain
is the sound of hundred shuffles of your feet on the road.
Water drop hanging from a leaf
is your voice.
The drenched tree-boughs
lacquer your arrival
Rain drops drumming on corrugated roof.
The old man starting his ignition.
Everything struggles for a meaning.
Everything is a slow metabolic paroxysm.
You run from country to country
with the hem of my skin,
the hail of my eyes,
the husk of my breath,
packed in your bag.
Only to arrive
in memories.
II
You run behind grand drapes.
You run behind teasers.
But I see you big, infinite
in my palms.
The smallest spot grows deep inside walls.
I, sometimes, forget you
amid prayers
from cupolas and steeples.
But then blades of grass creep from within
holding
a tear drop
from last year’s rains.
FELINE SECRET
In this desperation to know
you have a feline secret,
I cut open a leaf.
The sticky contours
layered love, meshed in ages of hesitation
the sweeping breeze.
You fall in my hand.
You stay there for a stroll, an outburst.
You tell me – I am confetti in your dreams.
I am the hammock of cobwebs between the walls of your memory.
I am the concrete in your riverine body.
I tell you nothing.
This desperation devours me.
MY BIRTH
I
In my vain time
I think of my birth,
when on the other side of the fence,
I can see a throng of anxious faces
in clean prayers
for a shape of me
inside her womb,
looming on her residue
buoyant,
a boat in the distant dark sea.
Bursting from the ashes of my grandfather,
as they say,
in the world of ants,
carrying food of worldly and unworldly pleasure
smelling pheromones
nearing life.
II
At the same time,
I look into the nerves of my mother’s eyes,
where I am taking birth
and on the other side of the fence.
Refugees drown,
make love in tents
in salty memories of home.
devastated by tanks and air-strikes.
The children understand artillery shell
instead of sea-shells.
The food is air-dropped
from God’s feet.
The wounds and blood
mummified by collapsed bricks and mortar.
III
I grow big in her placenta.
I am born to echo screams from:
drowned boats,
mangled trains,
trafficked human beings,
shelled buildings.
I am born to defeat untimely deaths
to carry them on my crimson shoulder of horizon,
to let them see
I am living through them
on sleepless nights
in each melancholic pang of a red-wattled lapwing.
IV
Peace is the child’s playground.
She recites a poem on tremors
listening to air strikes.
A building collapsing in her dreams
death inches towards her.
The dread of a loose nail in a dilapidated bridge
the closest to hope,
she knew,
was the sound of handclaps
and a teasing laughter.
Now hope:
is a moon
scratched by barbed wires
demarcating cemeteries
for death.
Born and raised in Kolkata and partially nurtured in Delhi, Pushpanjana Karmakar is a poet, fiction writer, and a corporate lawyer in Bangalore. She has contributed poems and short stories to magazines, including Indian Literature, The Poetry India: Enchanting Echos, The Bombay Review, The Scarlet Review, The Sunflower Collective, Coldnoon Poetry Potion, and others. One of her short stories has been published in the book Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts published by Red River. Excerpts from the manuscript of her novel, Memory in Motion, were selected for reading at the tata Literature Festival, 2022. How I Remember You IS How the Page Flips is her latest published poetry collection (Red River 2024)
