Visceral verses explore the fractured Self as a contested site of lived memory, navigating profound grief while reclaiming voice against systemic silence.
I am waiting for her at the edge of my body—
I look here, I look there—
endless road signs;
one by one, all traffic lights disappear.
The night is a naked knife,
the moon a convicted criminal.
Beyond the harbor, war photographs flutter
from burnt apartment walls—
children without shadows,
helmets filled with sand,
tanks dragging silence through the rubble.
I am rescuing wounded fish from the sea.
Black smoke rises like a second history
of my nameless nation.
Somewhere, flamingos crawl slowly
through fields of sleeping wheat.
Spring is here—
sirens continue stitching the dark together.
They return my body without its parts;
she believes it is me.
We offer prayers at gunpoint.
I sleep again in my zebra pants,
beneath ceilings cracked by invisible bombings.
Every day, the windows fill with lavender light—
I bite my lips, then rinse my face, brush my teeth,
pick at my skin even though I know better,
I spend my whole day
eating junk food, watching
YouTube videos of war in the desert.
slowly, the day sinks into the mirror of my bedroom,
all soldiers become dolls,
killing each other with painted, polished hands,
I keep to myself, scream into a pillow—
my body is covered in post-period spotting,
I start looking
for wads of toilet paper, something to erase it,
but see a landfill of stained cotton flowers
stacked like smiling gods waiting to be buried alive.
A pillar, monk-grey, still standing,
while the slumbering flesh of stone collapses
into the slow erasure of desire.
Hannah whispers—
verses submerged beneath Heidegger’s aging skin,
where existence rusts and rots
like warring nations laundering their sins.
They smoke their secrets through charcoaled memory—
eyes dripping with extinction memories.
Night thickens inside their freckled bodies,
underground terracotta soldiers searching their pockets
for dead bougainvillea.
Is this the unconscious history of violence,
or the repressed rage of toy tyrants?
Everything burns here, even the dust of moon.
The war has ended,
but there is no water in my desert city—
everyone carries milk in clay pots for the gods.
The thick syrupy scent arouses me
filling my body with strange cravings,
as if I have arrived somewhere unfamiliar
perhaps hostile.
Everything after war feels like intoxication.
like a steamy religious procession.
“Is this real or fictional?” I ask.
she does not answer
I stammer again—she knows
I have difficulty with speech.
She says, “let me save you from your thirst”.
I kiss her thick bleeding lips,
and suddenly I begin to explode like fat watermelons.
I wake up early,
arrange the antique rugs from Beirut
change the flowers in the vase,
the window glass trembles
like the silent love,
everything remains in its place,
even the vanishing moon in her eyelashes.
I realise
everything is so beautiful,
I rearrange everything again,
nothing is now missing
except my name.
I see—
they stand in the corner,
quiet and unmoving,
as if they had always been there,
beside their loaded guns.
Ashwani Kumar is a poet, author and academic in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian languages, his poetry volumes include ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’, ‘Banaras and the Other’ and ‘Architecture of Alphabets’. Recently, he has published “Rivers Going Home” (Red River)- a major anthology of Indian poetry. He is author of the acclaimed non-fiction ‘Community Warriors” (Anthem Press), and one of the chief editors of ‘Global Civil Society’ at London School of Economics. He is also cofounder of Indian Novels Collective, an initiative to popularise translation of classic novels of Indian languages. In leisure, he writes a book column in the Financial Express.
