Editors’ Note – Issue 15 (Poetry)

Dear readers,

Here are seven poets, seven ways of saying no.

Mugdhaa Ranade’s verses take a body apart, piece by piece, in blunt, clinical language, hammered along by doubled verbs (pull, pull; chew, chew; laugh, laugh) to show what obedience costs. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s lines break down word by word, each one landing like an indrawn breath, to record a neighbourhood’s ordinary noise, left uncleaned and unsorted, allowed to simply be. Katherine Shehadeh’s poems trade a flag for a household, then follow a city council’s fight to raise one anyway into the grinding, rhyming repetition of a villanelle, its refrain circling back like a memo nobody can close. Esha Volvoikar’s poems answer a former Prime Minister’s own words on a toppled statue back in his own syntax, couplet by couplet, argument meeting argument in a call-and-response beat. Michael Agunbiade’s poems count, in long, breathless, unbroken lines that never let a sentence pause, what a country does to people it decides it no longer wants: boats, borders, forgetting on purpose. Apabrita Mitra Sarkar’s poems number a grandmother’s decades of swallowed refusal, then let a body dissolve into pieces, rot and all, the lines shortening to a hush by the end. Jerald Lim’s poem drops the line, and the sound of the line, altogether, giving a waste basket a product name and asking it to carry what the rest of us don’t want to, in silence.

None of them are asking your permission. Read on and see what happens when the asking stops.

Happy reading.
Sivakami, Nithya, Suchi & Aditi