Cracked : Grace Fryberger
Congress, Trump and his Sycophants
Cracked & messy & befitting & broken
edges drop off like clots of foul stink
slip-shod & ignorant. tongue-tied together.
They ugly-stumble when their mouths open.
Fools. Craven. Schemers.
Harvesting the withered dreams of the marginalized
they forget them like torn remnants in a mispatched cloth-
its tatters no cover for cold souls in the night.
These souls drink dissatisfaction, belly bloats, cramps & stab guts.
This is not tardy or thoughtless.
Comes at a whistle. with a snap. straight off the tongue. through pencils. to tanks in the streets.
Crimson! cry our knuckles, their madhouse will reach to warp the lengths of our future
to their invisible, exclusive ends.
They will know their dissembling congress of spinelessness
as we reveal it through the friction from our unyielding masses.
Grace Fryberger lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Unstrung, Ohio Poetry Review, Blue Guitar, Arizona State Poetry Society and the Medical Literary Journal for University of Virginia.
Footnote : Areefa Ashraf
Before I learnt my own Jhelum,
I memorised the Thames.
Before the names
of our dead could enter essays,
I was taught daffodils,
Empire,
and compass-drawn griefs
that never sounded like home.
The classroom map
always began elsewhere.
England first.
America after.
India, eventually.
Kashmir
like a nervous footnote
afraid of occupying the page.
I learnt literature
the way conquered people
inherit mirrors
through someone else’s reflection.
My teacher called it universal
I noticed how universality
always arrived
with an accent.
In classrooms,
I began translating myself
before speaking.
Softening words.
Removing barbed edges.
Replacing wound with conflict,
occupation with issue,
fear with atmosphere.
Even my questions
must carry security checks.
A poem here
is expected to behave.
No sudden histories.
No dangerous memory.
No mother crying in Kashmiri
between two English paragraphs.
Sometimes I think
the syllabus was never neutral.
It was a border.
And I,
its most obedient migrant.
Areefa Ashraf, is an outgoing undergraduate from Kashmir whose interests lie in identity, language, belonging, and the politics of discourse. Her work has been published in Outlook Magazine.
Striptease : Shibani Phukan
The scarf unravels
A noose unknotted
A shibori tie and dye
A ripple of reds
Threading a sea of blue.
The sunflowers come undone
Petals dismembered from sepals
As anaesthetised fingers
Labour, fumble, and undo
The buttons on the floral shirt.
Jeans in a hugging fit
Offer no comfort
The seams chaff
The breaks in the skin
As they slump to the floor.
The shoes go last
And feet touches the ground
A current passes through
Grounding me, reviving me
Reminding me of who I am.
And I am battle ready
To stand witness
Tell my story
To wrest myself back
From the gang that left me undressed.
Shibani Phukan is an Associate Professor in the Dept of English, ARSD College, University of Delhi. Her areas of interest include writing from the northeast, women’s writing, and translation studies. She has published poems, articles and chapters in national and international journals such as Wasafiri, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Women’s Link, Fortell, The Criterion, and in books published by Routledge, Cambridge Scholars, Lexington books, Worldview and others. She also writes book reviews for The Book Review and The Scroll.
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