Five Poems by Tamanna Bangthai Fa(r)there You were born some good sixty years ago and I came after. A sneak peek into those years and I was dust in a ball of light, chaos and chance. No beginnings, no ends, no in-betweens, none for the sake of life, none for the lack thereof. That day, your quick glance lasted longer than two seconds and you kept looking above, in the same nonchalant way, you still do, maybe it was at that moment you had seen me, your gaze, traversing a milli

Snippets by my Father As a child my father dreaded earthquakes, he imagined that crevices formed out of them can be sewed into a table cover, hiding all painful memories. He taught me that the Northern plains are fertile, and if we sow well, we reap well. On a Sunday morning on the Malabar coast I held his forefinger, with my palm finding doodles of a safe space. He loved the breeze kissing my cheek, in the heat of the sun, walking on the golden-brown particles of sand, and r

My father studied agriculture to never raise tomatoes in grow bags. pumpkins flowered my childhood home, springing autumn in the family well