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
Wall
Life is counting forgotten small things, but birds imagine home beyond every solid wall.
June 15, 2022
If not for, when waiting for elevators to down itself,
counting holes of smoke detectors or the sieving seamless walls
or sweeping the helpline numbers to clear the antlers of mist
over the first phone number I memorised, what’s living composed of.
Or the teacher I forgot the name of yet list out the anger of
or urging birds—their feathered forms—to leave the building
I call home wherein they gurgle like roebucks preening
ruins awake with their tongues torpid. These birds manage to
make an aperture of all things that manage to make a wall.
They must assume that the other side of every wall is home.
📖
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.