Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 9, Number 1. May 2026. ISSN: 2581-7094
The Heart is a Strange Animal
--- Emisenla Jamir
My dead uncle keeps visiting me
in my dreams, he wears a suit
and smiles an awkward smile
as if he wants to reach out
to bridge the chasm that he drew.
But even dreams cannot erase
the little shards of memories
that finds its roots inside the heart,
nor can it stop the body from flinching away
from the remorse of the dead.
And though it seems to appear
that the dead want to make amends,
it comes a touch too late,
for the heart is a strange animal,
and even in dreams, it still remembers.
Why I Cannot Write the Saddest Lines
Today
--- Emisenla Jamir
Dear friend, foe, stranger,
you who have been reading
my words in daylight,
in the madness of midnight,
I’m clawing through the avalanche of crabs
with words that feel strange and unsettling.
There is the darkness still,
but my days have softened.
The ink has begun to dry
more bittersweet than bitter.
Certain hours come with a sting,
but there is a lightness,
and perhaps that is why I cannot write
the saddest lines today.
Waiting in the Hollow Light of the
Morning
--- Emisenla Jamir
I seem to have forgotten
the act of writing,
the act of loving
Words.
Even now, my mind wanders away
from piecing together
this broken train
confronting me like an angry child
throwing tantrums in the middle of the track
thrashing and threatening to embarrass me,
What has become of you?
I have folded under
the weight of a single month,
where feelings have come undone.
The bread has been broken,
only the crumbs remain
in the hollow light of the morning.
Rabbi, is it I?
So many faces to forget,
So many threads to cut away.
I am not You.
I can only wait.
Some Hurts
--- Emisenla Jamir
There are some hurts
that gather over time,
the meanness of life that erupts
in small bursts, glazed over by
cups of tea, an offering of peace
for an earlier exhibition
of bewildering bitterness.
There are these little hurts
that pile up over time,
the rudeness of life,
some deliberate shamings,
some condescending acknowledgements,
and such others that stick to your skin.
And these hurts they come,
and these hurts, they will come,
again and again, and
we’ll continue to breathe and
we’ll continue to gather
only to let go, slowly
one by one,
slowly,
one by one.
Play
--- Emisenla Jamir
Some afternoons, I catch myself
thinking out loud,
and by “some”, I mean “most”,
but that might make you wary
of the clutter in my head,
make you think that this verse is
slowly beginning to sound like
a confession written in prose,
and these breaks, just tricks
of the trade to make you think
that these words carry some weight,
food for thought and all such
lovely cakes to sweeten
the sour realisation that you travelled
all these wasted lines to reach the end.
The End.
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Bio:
Emisenla Jamir is a writer
and educator based in Kohima, Nagaland. She is the author of two poetry
collections: Loneliness is an Orange (Barkweaver, 2018) and This is How We
Disappear (PenThrill, 2022). Her short fiction has also been featured in the
Zubaan anthology, The Many That I Am (2019) and Everyman’s Library collection,
Indian Stories (2026).
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