Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
Short Bio: Kushal Poddar is the author of ‘Postmarked Quarantine’ and has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe.
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
The Titillation
A bird has left an azure feather
on our cold red cement sill.
It corroborates the curiosity’s tale
about the bird, about me.
The bird must have probed the room,
bearings, belongings, my chair,
my father’s table, crime-club
book of the month and the silk flower
you crafted in-between the pages
fifty two and three.
A breeze levitates the feather.
My palm stays open, impoverished.
The whistle from the nearby train track
asks, “Why do you never desire to know
where I go and with whom?”
I shake the window-frame and flip it.
Mistral
The leaves gossip
to the vardar, mistral.
One white hair entwines a reed.
It is the time for our winter jackets
albeit not quite, not this year.
I try to cheer you up,
“We know the end, yes,
but the ways are endless.”
Moody Swamp
The plant stuck in its tub, in
an ever youth, bears
the burden of my mate’s
dry-weather norale, flow state.
The other week he brought a brook,
softened the dirt, that sunk an inch.
The hardest part of the bole
rose up a little.
I hold the tub, lift the plant.
The old leaves yellow the circle.
Sun flares up an will-o’-the-wisp
in the swamp of the room.
In bokeh my friend sits in front
of the tarots spread on the table of fate.
They show nothing but a hand-fan pattern.
Rays spatter like a chicken’s sacrifice.
As The Memory’s Vultures Circle
“Where are you going?”
He cannot answer me
for the first time or the second.
He has to rake his head
before he can say,
“I don’t know.” His voice sounds
autumnal. A pale wind brushes
the tips of the streetlights.
The sky will not tell us
if it is an evening or a morning
and the city has forgotten
to turn off the lights.
The posts remind me of cacti
in a deserted path.
The Cat and The Pigeon
I don’t hear the off beat footsteps
of my father’s friend. Not because
my father released his pet cat,
sank in sleep one afternoon last July
and didn’t wake up, but because of his eyes.
He cannot drive anymore. Public transport
puzzles him. Roads show little mercy.
He has no smart phone and seldom
picks up the other one. He falls ill;
a two-tone pigeon comes and sits
on our North window. One Wednesday
it sits for a long time. The bird leaves,
doesn’t return. Perhaps nothing
makes him sick these days.
