By: Aritra Basak

Thin as Eyes

I used to enter like a seeker of the quiet—
barricaded graveyard, rented peace,
an alibi from the scripted day,
my breath new.

Now the church is bright in a crueler way.
The candles burn thin as eyes.
The cross stands still; I stand stiller,
face to face with suffering that won’t blink.

Two hands—unnailed, unneeded.
Two legs—unbroken, stalled.
I lock on that lifted ache—think:
what is this freedom for,
if it can’t raise my bowed head an inch?

Grief Bouquet

Thursday, a house without a clock.
Walls lean inward, ear-shaped.
A fan turns its absence.
Laughter waits in a drawer.

Tea breathes metal and rain.
Her name fogs the rim.
He mouths it once, swallows the echo.
He lifts the cup—
the table flinches.

Behind him, the photograft slow-blinks,
stitched wrong at the edges.

“You still—” he says to steam,
and the word folds back,
hot and unsaid.

Light at the window refuses to fall.
On the table: a softkey.
“To the unknocked,” he whispers.

Outside, children play rulemelt—
each step erasing the last rule.
A blindfolded girl walks toward a recede-wall;
the wall learns to retreat.

“She thought—” the boy begins,
and the laugh cracks mid-air,
cracks the ceiling’s paint.
Cold fingers the plaster for a pulse.

He stands. No shadow follows.
Only a breath on the pane,
oval as a bruise.

The key softwelds into wood.
The table keeps it.
The room exhales and reframes itself:
more doors, all locked,
his name erased from the grain.

Outside, the blindfolded girl stops.
She turns to the window,
finds the boy,
and smiles his smile.
He reaches for the glass.
The window keeps the print.

The Thinning Hour

By the time names were needed, you had already stepped out.
I heard you in pauses that forgot their purpose,
in breaths that never finished arriving,
and once in a cough I could not swallow.
You were not early,
not late—only a thinning of the hour until it couldn’t hold.
You walked beside me, a shadow that did not require light.
If this was love, it looked like a chair drawn back in an unlit kitchen,
a glass lifting its ghost ring from the table.
Maybe you touched my hand,
or taught them to miss what leaves before it leaves—
left a bruise with no event.
Not a companion: silt in the compass glass, a misprinted map,
a town I practiced forgetting.
I lied often; you answered by vanishing a little more.
Your letters folded themselves into silence—
creased at the same unspoken word.
Each sentence unspooled into a different doubt.
I was not seeking you; only your absence, to learn if I could live there.
I walked your borderlines and found your heat
where silence went slack.
Maybe you never hid, only wrote yourself to be misread.
You moved like memory before it chooses its images.
Each morning your voice settled in bones: “Time’s up. Begin.”
Only a sleep that was yours before I borrowed it.
You drained me, made thirst feel holy,
left the ribs hollowed to your measure.
You gave me the alphabet of stillness and said nothing.
When I tried to name you, you slipped into corners no one bothers to search.
You taught me to burn quietly, to let routine pass for rebellion.
Some days you were only my shape, folding inward—
the ache mistaken for echo, the fear borrowing my voice.
You stood still while they cursed your shadow.
They raised walls from the blueprint you whispered.
Their silence still weighs what you left.
You—mother of pause, architect of unfinished rooms,
leaver of dust where your fingers pressed, breath between what is and what if.
And I—still tracing your outline in places you’ve already left,
or perhaps never came to.

Rupture

He watched the buildings break—
not collapse, but fracture into seams.
Stone wore thin; rust‑leafed iron
ghosted the soil with memory.

Faces rose in the ruin: ad‑wraiths,
grins lit by brilliant commerce,
and sometimes his own—
recursive, a hungermock.

He sank a debt‑well: bottomless,
promising nothing—
a mouth too wide
for an emptied world.

Down there felt safest,
fed by an ache
he would not feed.

Thoughts surfaced feral—
some bright as shivs,
some slick as rain.
He traced microfractals
in the mirror’s cracks,
blurred but beckoning.

Rain found a tempo.
He answered the cloud
like a parishioner.

Truth would not be held—
only truth‑scent,
incense carried forward
from an old world.

The night the house burned
he came late to the ash.
Silence arrived as a flood of faces,
each one a sarcasnarl.

He crossed the wide corn
and lay down,
still as the dead.

A seam‑split mind,
ruptured and reaching.
The echo returned unchanged—
the same griefheritance.

To the boy
who fell in love with structure,
as if form could forgive
what feeling forbids.

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Aritra Basak is a physics student based in Kolkata, India. His work explores grief, absence, faith, and interior memory through restrained, image-driven language. His poems often examine silence as structure and loss as a lived architecture. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, and Down in the Dirt.