Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 9, Number 1. May 2026. ISSN: 2581-7094
Paper-Cut
---- Namrata Pathak
Bleeding over a page from
Han Kang’s Vegetarian,
I turned anaemic,
phosphorous, pale-coral with perforations,
white air — the
paper-sponge sucks all my blood in.
Though books profess to shun
ways of violence and stick
to peace, words kill
without guns. Now that there is a trail
of memories over the
gooseberry words, no longer appetising,
perhaps a way tangy for my
taste, I want to forget that your name
was a bruise. The more I
read, the more anaemic I become.
I am hungry. The taste of
dried pork with akhuni lingers
underside my tongue. It
drowns the pungency of the wind
in the garden, the
nostrils trailing the bunch of aromatic fern heads,
leaves threading through
my porch grill, looking for a familiar
smell called home.
I am hungry. Mawrei should
have brought meat from the local market,
not a book on slow love,
riots, blood.
I cut my finger again.
Bamboos are Unfinished
Love Poems
---- Namrata
Pathak
Turn to jagged rocks and
bamboo flowers: They are good listeners.
The red-brown-orange
leaves in Likai, falling in hoards in autumn evenings
are at war with me. They
shape-sift.
In a madness for remedy,
for some sleep, I shut my skin to night’s floating candles,
the fingers of air tap on
my brown skin, the translucent needles stich leaves, trellis,
bodies: Above, the holes
in the sky are mended with aplomb. No light.
No light turns inward to
catch earthworms
in mossy bones,
and black tongues.
But the sky is everyone’s
country: It is an escapade into a world that mirrors no world.
The pathways turn back to
every point of origin, only the journey remains.
A Poem
---- Namrata Pathak
Ink stains smudge the
margins of my blank page. They are snails
shut to the coldness of
your touch, flames on tongues travelling
to unkempt places: beyond
the tyranny of skin-on-skin,
this love is not known to
the world.
Dying between water and
land, hope and loss, it finds its way
into the grief of a
traveller. This poem is more water than land,
each drop an act of
faithlessness: it awaits the homecoming
of a betrayer.
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