KINDNESS four commandments and a caution
Live as a deep-rooted tree, an open meadow, an armored body, always…
Read more →
From ULR
Issue 1 – The Beginning
BREASTS
Sun and moon reside within, a veiled, certain beauty awaiting its wolf-hour reveal.
July 15, 2018
My skin sun, my breasts moon.
Chandra, you spoke in riddles.
The letters swam. I stared at them,
trying to extract meaning
like milk from a stone.
Gnomic, you wrote silver on gold.
The laws of the universe in my body.
Surya shining all day in my eighteen arms,
my muscled neck, my golden navel.
And only at the wolf-hour, the white-owl hour,
the cow-dust hour,
did I bare the light, the invisible fullness
that waited all day, veiled and certain
in its beauty, unmarred
by the fact of reflected glory.
Breath failed.
Each nipple was a sphinx under your mouth.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONBREASTS and 3 other poems
View Full Collection →
Sampurna Chattarji
Sampurna Chattarji is a writer, editor, translator and teacher with twenty-one publications to her credit. These include Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins 2015, 2020), which she wrote while on residency at the University of Kent, Canterbury; Dirty Love (Penguin 2013), which is her short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai; and Wordygurdyboom! (Puffin Classics 2008), which is her translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose. Her translation of Joy Goswami’s prose poems After Death Comes Water (Harper Perennial, 2021) has been lauded as a recreation of the Bangla originals in ‘a living voice, as inventive and vivid as the English of Joyce’. Sampurna’s work as an editor includes Future Library (Red Hen Press 2022) an anthology of contemporary Indian writing released in the US. The most recent of her eleven poetry titles is Unmappable Moves, just out from Mumbai-based indie-press Poetrywala. She can be found on Instagram as @ShampooChats.