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    Mid flight

    By Sanket Mhatre

    Bending over clouds
    We are dunked, face first
    Into the broken arteries of Kolkata:
    Dissected torso of a civilization, blinking back

    A vanishing sunset sprints
    below a network of lacklustre lakes
    suspended in time
    Green stillness festering in colonial wounds

    Our fingers trace her desiccated tributaries, desolate perimeters
    Brittle sentences from a lost fable breaking at the seams
    While miniaturised humanity rearranges
    its beginning and end

    A new story foaming
    At the mouth of its river
    Yearning for reinterpretation
    from citizens in the sky

    We realise
    Mid-sentence and mid flight
    are the same things
    spoken skywards

    Sanket Mhatre has been curating Crossover Poems ? a multilingual poetry recitation session featuring some of the most prominent Indian poets from multiple languages. Apart from this, he has also been featured at Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Poets Translating Poets, Goa Arts & Literature Festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, Vagdevi Litfest and Glass House Poetry Festival. His first book of cross-translated poems, Sarva Anshantun Apan / The Coordinates Of Us co-written with Rochelle Potkar has been released by Varnamudra Publications.

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      Usawa in Swahili means equality. The Usawa Literary Review is a bi-annual English language literary magazine dedicated to feminist literature and writings by and about underrepresented communities.

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