Poems By Sahana Mukherjee

Sahana Mukherjee studies at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. Her poems have previously been published in Muse India, Economic and Political Weekly, The Four Quarters Magazine, Café Dissensus, Bangalore Review, The Sunflower Collective.

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I’ve been writing down hurt, Richie —
About to be a decade soon.
It’s still the size of your silence,
and the gap in our being.
(All for Richie, who would have read.)

Dusting the weed midway

Love is our tongue,
a letter
that comes knocking
every night
after I fall asleep.
Love, a flight
of pigeons
in an imagined courtyard,
all black
and free.

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We speak water

When you spoke,
we were a river.
When you didn’t,
we were the sea–
Our half-eaten words
are now an ocean
(of the fifth night)
when we tell each all
that we want to be.

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On receiving

Your words
tell me mine
are grains of salt
easily dissolved, in our city
Every evening,
when it rains.

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Our

Love,
like most others
is grammar – less
Existing
like a body
in fits.

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Conversation(s)

We do not sip coffee,
sit miles away
in a shop, a home
Where you discuss train wrecks
and plane wrecks and
choose the train
for your memory.
The latter
means Alzheimer’s, you say
and grin a little
from across the map.
My grandmother had Alzheimer’s,
I answer back
and unlike her, I’m glad
You’re here to stay.

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Bonsai on a screen

I lean toward
what’s lifeless,
Three blinks away
is your circle of light,
Three walls away
from me,
From all that’s true.

Image: Antique Mexican painting