moon

Meet me
under the strawberry moon.
I'll be the one
dressed like the sea.
~ Ron Wills

Shy girl

For the shy girl
with windows in her eyes,
a kiss hidden in a poem
about walking in gardens
where there are no gardens, 
but tangled paths balanced
between our yesterdays
and our tomorrows.
You're beautiful.
I won't ever touch your hand,
not until I become the wind.

~Ron Wills

I will write you letters this winter

I will write you letters this winter

I will write you letters this winter
When the snow falls and the fire crackles
I will race over those alphabets
Lingering on ones I felt
When I stood under the warm sluicing water
and you were mist across the shower of rain
I caught a glimpse of you in the golden sunlight
outside the deep green curtains.
I will hold you in coherent coincidences
And I will refuse to turn the page
I will sit with mulled words and live in exuberant summers
When the ascending spirals of smoke groan wet
Ebbing away the sensation that leaped up the chimney
I will know you were hanging on to the soot.
You were holding on and clinging to my roof.
I will look at you as tenderly as the moon
Looks at the frozen icicles that remain on the branches
When every living room will be swarming with unions and laughter
This Christmas
I will write you letters under the mistletoe
I will not proliferate or pluck my history from yours
I will let my now and then merge in yours
I will not let the distance long or throb
I will let us squeeze and snuggle into a poem
When passion will river on my soft swollen syllables
I will unfasten the violet from my ink
and spill all over you,on and again

I will write you letters till the winter ends.

~ by Poulome Mitra Shaw

My Failing Eye                                                                                                   
Debsruti Basu

There is a manner 
in which things shape up, 
inside my head. 
Like well-paved roads, 
leading to fallen houses. 

I know all the stories.
I remember them with the precision 
of how they began — 
how each eyelash dropped a lie, 
or a truth, combining the two. 

And I have my endings, 
like curtains that were once lace —
holding up the window, 
like a body of its own. 

My hands lie folded, 
on my sterile chest. 
With no children to feed, 
neither to own,          

I sleep like an old nostalgia shop. 

But you, you remember to leave this city —
leave these walls, 
this village, nameless. 
For when the shutter finally falls down, 
don’t see your face, 
for sale —
crumbling within.