Your Voice is Not a Slice
Keep roots full, gourds bitter; let wild nature fiercely twine against all…
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From ULR
Issue 11 – Appetite
Mothers Deal with Termites like Time
A mother battles time’s voracious termites, burning mountains of lost domestic order.
June 15, 2024
The almirah is eaten shut
by insatiable voracity
this world is
in the universe
of termite mouths. My mother
recounts scorpions
of termite bites,
antness of their hurry,
blind vultures in their hunger
to gulp down order
like distorting convexities
our lives pose
through the phone.
I can’t
hear you, I say.
Amid what’s lost
in transmission, she is counting
for me the times she walked down
holding mountains
of half-eaten sarees
she is burning with kerosene.
I am
taking a break, she says
between one round of burning
and a fierier one after our phone call
ends and I go to fix myself
something to eat.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONMothers Deal with Termites like Time and 5 other poems
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Dr. Rahana K Ismail
Dr. Rahana K Ismail is the author of ‘Newtness’ released by Yavanika Press in 2022. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2021, 2022), The Penn Review, The Lighthouse, Usawa Literary Review, Muse India, POSIT, Alchemy Spoon, Ink Sweat and Tears, Barzakh, Bending Genre, nether Quarterly, Contemporary Haibun Online, Aainanagar, Aleph Review, Chakkar, Alipore Post, Last Leaves, Farmer-ish, Stone of Madness, Foxglove, Hakara, Qissa, Verse of Silence, Pine Cone Review among others. She has read her poems as a panelist of the session ‘Defiance and Daughters’ in the Glass House Festival 2024.