By: Kushal Poddar

A Sonnet For Paradox’s Repeat Offender

We skedaddle from remembrance
and its strict policing,
yet here we stand- midst
a street of broken houses, holes for the walls.
Memory’s widened its reach.

We have souvenirs from the life this far
in a handcart we can
afford and drag across
the spine of the serpentine lanes, asphalts.
You carry the child we never have.

The other inmates stare through their panes.
Rain crosses a feline.
Cars remain stalled for a tick.
Silence holler from the shanties- “Repeat offender, fáilte.

###

Dodos Bite Back

Its endemic feet traipse
on the clothesline spliced
to hang our family size peace,
abraded nonetheless.

My sister is found later
inside the car
James hotwires from the Good Garage.
Pop threats both with
a senile gun last fired in a fib
about a war in Far East.

Mother plagues the array of porcelains.
I turn from them, see
the Dodos leaving a bite deep
in the sky,
its body Cheshire all but those feet.

###

Tea

The tea man lugs his swaying
moveable merchandise. His singsong
voice penetrates the humdrum – Tea?
He asks the ironing man, balloon man,
father buying a Pokémon blimp
for his whinny offspring, chow mien seller
who avails tea service again and again.
The tea man dares the drizzling, makes merry
of the monsoon binge. His kettle on the heat
caged in a tin volumetric curve emits
a visible hiss every time he pops the paper muzzle
as if unbridled, the madcap kettle would go berserk
on the ones less agreeable.

Lemon tea? The tea man asks the people
conspiring sitting on a stone and the ones
their flagrant cabal desires to unsettle.
The kettle hisses at all.

###

Sparrow

The ineffable loss imagined
as a sparrow, named for the call-sake –
‘Saki’, serves rain in tintinnabulation,
and of course rain is a witch of sorrow.
This feeling runs amok to and fro
through the lanes of my veins.

It reminds me of the postman asking the man
at 50/4 if he knows me of the 50/4/A.
Imagine all those notices drop from his hands
on the wrong staircase, and the wrong man
for the right reasons tells the postman,
no 50/4/A exists.

The sparrow leaves a fistful of crumbs
on the sill. Do you think those will appease me?
Do you think it flies over the 50/4 and the postman?