Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
Inheritance
--- Antara Mukherjee
I wake up in the night
feeling the same seismic
shift
When my mother had died
Seventeen years ago, at
eight fifty-five to be precise
Or perhaps even before-
when her tongue sucked the diagnosis like sorbitrate
Cancer: a
foaming ancient lute which calcifies the core into an instant fossil
The opposite of life is
not death
It’s the silence that’s
ever so alive in the surrounding mirrored tiles
when you first listen
saying it to yourself: Cancer
The stammering, the
rage, the careening
alienating the mind, the
marrow, the innards
into a concavity of
absence
Chandan agarbatti,
tuberoses on a vase, coalesce
with the monochrome
frame of my grandmother in the room
who had suffered the
same diagnosis- kept from her in parenthesis
A squishy nautilus
shell, she had once coiled another heartbeat within
wherein I lay silent in
my co-habitation, merely a protoplasm inside my mother then
Forming a mandala of
shared peals, ticks, grief and perhaps diagnosis.
Now with every step
ahead, I leave something behind
As the insomniac nights
arrive trampling with its hooves
To exhume my brimming
legacy
Monopoly of colour
--- Antara Mukherjee
The young scion
mounts the dais with joined hands, waves at the single-colour monopoly.
His bandhgala and starched ajkan, have stiffened
him into a prized position. A painter he was meant to be. He taps a meek,
“Hello” into the microphone – feeding, HELLO, hello, hell-o – and cultivated
claps clog the space in between.
Sunrise blushes
At the amber dyed cotton
Extravagance of
Dhobighat
Abated breaths are
rattling his poster promises. As his throat chokes with his inherited speech.
Threaded marigolds weigh down his spine- moments from his fabled victory. He
looks around at the sea of eyes, not a teardrop he can own.
bubbling pot of dye
weaves lamenting its
purity
unbled, unbleached,
unredeemed
Rundown
--- Antara Mukherjee
A corner bakery,
streetdogs at its door,
sleeping
There’s a blackforest on
a red-white chequered tablecloth. The little boy plucks the cherry, flicks
across- its sweet pungence. His ayah pretends not to look,
it’s a routine. In his head he’s deciding: “In-pin-safety-pin,
bun-maska or plain muffin?” Tomorrow is secured then, also the day after and
the next. So what if he gets to meet his Mumma only at bedtime? She has
promised him an after-school cake every day. In exchange.
Sugardust fills the
blanks
Floats and fogs
The years
One colour for each day,
one flavour. Stacks a rainbow in seven. Like the raspberry-red lipstick, she’s
leaving on his wet cheeks for goodnight tonight. Every night. An empty rush of
sugar.
Piled chairs, stale mawa
cake,
pink puffing paint on
the walls
But the show must go on.