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 7 – Environment
As Spectators to Demolition
A guillotine-flash demolishes a home, scattering categorized fragments of intimate, barren spaces.
June 15, 2022
They are categorising
what has fallen
from the house.
Plastic is a conglomerate
of colours. Metal shards of suns.
Of wood a consortium
of old and golden: teak, palm, window,
willow, bark, bureau, bundles of
bookends. A ledge
held more than you ever thought
it would. A 50p coin, nail clipper,
potted Tulsi, tape recorder,
a key, nights
and niches of you.
Now barren. Now bloated
with senseless light.
Demolishers weighing
liveries one would don in this drama.
Coastal wind takes
a turn here as if it can come down
and unsee like a blind.
As if barrenness rhymes with
its sound of slicing down
all at once in a guillotine-flash.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONA Chapter full of Living Things and 4 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.