Fiction & Poetry
1. A Certain Type of Life since the age of 16 I idealised a certain type of life involving certain…
tender lips that had forgotten, momentarily, the taste of mother’s milk and couldn’t tell the silence of the womb from…
The thing about crushes, is that eventually they stop being that. I’m not saying love dies or anything, I’m just saying, that Love never was and sometimes it takes a few months of tumbling across perfumed bedsheets
All I have known of loving men is emotional labour, And by that, I mean back-breaking, soul-sucking toil, Oh, the relief of carrying nothing but yourself, Oh, the relief of taking nothing but pleasure from their sex
That’s all the big roles and ethics
All there to fulfil.
Another task,
Another box to tick
Another concrete path to rush
Quick, simple and straight.
I would once again be theirs, in memory, on the day my lover would die.
“She rightly read the moment while I stumbled through a second-hand text.” – Jeanette Winterson But second-hand texts lay…
“Life’s too small without freshly cut coriander
Generously sprinkled on kadhai chicken.
Mint leaves blitzing their way with tomatoes
Ripe from the vine to the fingers dripping chutney –
Fragrances of earth between all this concrete.”
I see people and places,
Couples and crushes
I hear giggles and whispers.
These are the secrets untold to me.
Why does the gap feel so wide no matter how much I explain, again and again, that I do not mean to hurt him… hurt any of them? I feel torn… but Amma and Appa need my help at home. Lockdown has been so damn hard.
Days upon days rushed by, tatoh chiya, alu thukpa, chicken cowrie, and beer kept us warm during the rejections.
The governing eyes throughout history have dictated the acceptable forms of the performance of sex.