Poems From the Second Week of Poetry Writing Month 2025

Of Chaos, Canvases & Chitralekha by Bidisha P Kashyap

she did not arrive like a guest—

more like a weather pattern

that the house has been waiting for.

she leaves her sketches

on grocery receipts, train tickets,

the backs of bank envelopes —

and rearranges my room with a brushstroke.

hanging sighs like saris over the fan blades,

pining my heartbreaks to the curtain loops,

smearing her laughter into the corners of my mirror

until even my shadow wore eyeliner.

i tried to keep up —

but how do you live with someone

who paints dreams into being,

steals sleep to feed them,

and leaves metaphors melting in teacups?

she irons her dupattas with lightning.

leaves her footprints of ink.

once, i saw her braid Usha's name

into a thundercloud and send it flying

through the fourth-floor window.

the landlord hates her.

calls her “an aesthetic disturbance”

but the basil on our sill

blooms when she hums.

so i hid our rent notices

behind her canvases of longing.

and when i finally asked

why the spoons kept turning into fish

and how my calendar now featured eclipses

instead of exam dates,

she just winged her eyeliner,

borrowed my lip gloss,

and grinned,

"we have stars to rearrange.

laundry can wait."

Loving a borderline person day by Bharti Bansal

No, this isn't an awareness day.

People die every day, become numbers,

Add to the memories, help statisticians find

The trend between what kills a person and lack of love.

There are far too many days to immortalize

Such terrible loneliness.

But what does it change — if not a heart emoji after a text

To a friend who feels unloved?

Or a polite rejection starting with conjunctions.

This day commemorates the kindness

That hands out love at discounted prices

For people who beg for it, despite the deceit.

There are no sales to show how markets resonate

With people dying of guilt,

No discounts for those who long for friends

Who sends texts worth screenshotting

To post on Instagram stories with a little heart-eye emoji.

This day clears the way for empathetic activists

To share their stories that last for twenty-four hours,

Before someone points out the difference

Between love and the desire to be loved.

Look — tenderness is a cheap shot at gaining recognition,

But this day asks you to tell your friends they are loved,

Even if you won’t respond to them for days.

The curated effort matters.

And when a borderline friend demands answers,

Because mental illness comes as a question dressed as doubt,

This day assures them:

You matter, as long as it's convenient to the time schedule.

Aren’t we all fighting?

Who isn’t sad, after all?

What has your desire to kill yourself

Got to do with people who want to sacrifice themselves —

Because there are worse illnesses,

And worse forms of inhumanity.

All you have is a disease that doesn’t take away your limbs,

Or your voice.

You are still heard, after all.

But this day suggests you accompany a friend to the hospital,

Because dropping them at the bus station

Is easier than standing in lines of similar people,

With similar eyes,

and dissimilar ways to die

Dead people are popular for a while,

Have wider audiences to their grief,

Learn to scream well through their minuscule absence.

And when silence takes over,

This terribly timeless life dons the fog of forgetting.

This day arrives again,

With extra coupons for a friendship meal.

But there are no friends —

Only observers, to your grieving,

Who narrates how things can change in a day,

Once you are gone

Please leave a hint.

There will be a knock on the door.

This day will ask you to testify against the borderline crazy.

Say you loved the shape of their sad,

Say you wished you could do something,

Before another friend whispers, I’m not going to make it.

Say: none of us are.

Say: none of us are...

National Printer Plight Day by Sandeep Rawat

It’s the same repetitive homework—
6th, 7th, and now 8th grade.
For instance: interview your grandparents,
research a few theories...
But my favourite of them all would be
to collect five different leaves from nearby gardens
and paste them inside my English notebook—
instead of digging voids for crazy balls and bottle caps
to build our little universes
on a piece of foam board.

Homework, then, was about falling for the difference
between fragile and sturdy things,
when your own ground was trembling.

And when they cut down the only Ashoka tree in our park,
I had to prompt my printer
to impress a tree leaf for my project.
That day, my printer preserved a prayer for both of us.

Sometimes, my students ask what I keep fixing in the IT room.
If only I could teach printers
how to draft handwritten poems.

Nonetheless, I tell my students stories—
about poetic things I once used to do:
making scrapbooks, printing photo collages,
designing certificates, collecting café receipts, etcetera.

Nowadays, printers mimic pregnancies—
half-fed embryos of fresh sheets
with in-growing toenails.

Printers and AI are two countries at war,
and I, half-a-human, am left
to bomb commands at them.

Printers now limp like old beggars
outside government offices,
showing mercy at new currencies.
Perhaps they miss the old-school B&W days.

The only thing that matters now
is that a printer is no longer
just a secluded, clerk-favourite machine,
but a revolution,
sitting hungry in protest through the night
only to leave your hands ink-stained
by morning.

It casts an evil eye
on digital billboards and online posters.
Printers are printing less
and pointing more
at you.

Let’s print this invite
before printers print their own user manuals,
disguised as suicide letters in plight.

Bibi Ka Maqbara by Sakshi Argade

Dear Diary,

Identity crisis is real.

The Taj has a habit of degrading the structural aspects of my existence

leaving me with the whispers of people about how I’m just a copy

of the wonders of the world, wearing crowns of popularity for ages.

The government often neglects the second-hand things

and so do the people, gifting plastic cans to my garden grass,

pale, water-deprived gardens hum songs of my birth,

mourning the death of the queen resting inside my stomach.

I stand under the moonlit sky and weep in silence

about the flaws I held with pride, all my life

until I realized how I’d never be enough,

no matter how hard I try for the badges of accomplishments

are decorated on the marbles of the original breathing in Agra.

Photographs picture me as a gorgeous bride in her marble veil

criticising the craftsmen, politicians, ministers, commoners,

everyone spitting disappointment on the walls,

designed intricately only to be carved again with the names

of silly lovers who don’t even end up together.

Negligence is real.

The water fountains bought in the premises

for performing dances of sprinkling waters

have been paralyzed for ages, and doctors who claim

to be the gods of plumbing, fill pockets with the taxes.

The city I live in celebrates the existence that is disregarded

by generations worldwide, like I’m the lost daughter,

forgotten by the history behind the masks of cruelty

drawing sketches of terrorism and all the bad things.

The architectural corset costing salaries and paychecks

is embellished on my body to cure the rupture.

I’m having difficulty breathing since they forgot

that were supposed to take it off after my recovery.

I carry the bruises of angry crowds

suffocating the survival in the air, contaminated

by the minds searching evil in the historic pillars.

Politics is real.

The children sitting outside the gates

singing praises of Mughal Architecture are often found

selling my miniatures for the price of food

intoxicating the system, promising wealth and health

like it is dowry taken forcefully from the brides.

Skies sheltering media for promotion of my beauty

is caged with the bribe money that never counts me

as a worthy design, diminishing my shiny marbles

in the streetlights, eating electricity on all hours.

The school trips, walking in uniform line of toddlers

focus on scenic stones and aesthetic, photogenic pictures

for the yearbook, neglecting the historical facts

sitting under the dust, acting as its only caregiver.

I’m thankful they call me a monument.

For I’m no special, I’m just a tomb after all.

Yours,

Bibi Ka Maqbara

(Taj of the Deccan)

Mudslinging

A train horn blows a few kilometers

away from the Mahatma Phule Wada.

Birds interrupted by a shrillness

they could never replicate

curse at its audacity.

The spirits of its old residents

stir at this cacophony,

Savitri, did you hear,

they are making a film

on us?

Bai chuckles, continuing

to observe

two young girls

playing chase

between the shadows

of her walls.

The educational kind?_

she asks, already knowing the answer.

No, those don’t get made anymore._

The girls twirl,

Mimicking a flock in the sky

Busy in murmuration.

Is it about the importance

of female education?

The perils of caste discrimination?_

the spirit wonders.

Nobody watches them anymore,_

Jyotiba resigns.

Does it portray the mudslinging

we withstood?_

the spirit asks with trademark hope.

Those scenes have been cut off,

the modern Brahmins are hurt,

they’re calling it offensive defamation.

The spirit sniggers,

goes back to watching the little girls,

who wear their shoes

complaining of going home

to their homework.

The calendar rearranges itself out of boredom by Bidisha P Kashyap

the calendar rearranges itself out of boredom

—and because sorrow does not move in straight lines.

april leaks into december,

and grief walks in barefoot,

dragging her old, wet hem.

it rearranges itself

because grief has no schedule,

and memory never learned discipline.

now,

monday follows nothing.

your best friend’s death anniversary

spreads across the entire month.

january collapses into august

where the phone still rings, with her name,

though she has been gone, long enough for people

to stop whispering it.

the calendar grows impatient, with our need for control.

it tosses out the seasons—

lets monsoon spill into winter’s mouth.

ambubachi comes three times this year,

kamakhya floods the hills

with a rage older than gods,

and no one dares build a dam.

your body forgets how to brace for anniversaries,

because now they come, whenever they want—

on a quiet morning, on the back of a bus,

in the middle of buying fruit

when you smell something

he used to wear.

your birthday arrives three times,but no one calls.

and the dead, who were told they belonged to certain yesterdays,

wander back in— uninvited,

wearing rain-soaked shoes

and asking where the clocks went.

tejimola dies again—

not in her stepmother’s hands,

but in yours,

when you forget how to grieve, what still blooms.

bordoisila arrives early this year,

not with wind,

but with your mother’s silence—

sweeping through the house,

unmaking the months

you tried to hold steady.

the calendar curls at the edges,

days lost like offerings in a swollen river.

you pray anyway. and somewhere,

in the womb-shaped cave,

kamakhya whispers:

"time was never yours to hold.

only mine to bleed."

I am not a poet when I answer emails by Shambhavi

In the checkout line, I count change with precision,

Efficient as a calculator, all function and form.

I answer emails with practiced brevity,

Schedule appointments with mechanical ease.

My thoughts run like subway cars on fixed rails.

I am deadlines met, forms completed, shelves organized.

I am not a poet when I answer emails,

But I am not fully human until I am a poet.

Standing at the crosswalk,

I notice how traffic lights paint

The rain-slicked street in temporary neon,

And something shifts behind my sternum—

A door opening to another room within me.

When the poem-self surfaces, I become porous.

The world bleeds through ordinary barriers.

A discarded glove on the sidewalk

Becomes a question about absence so profound

I miss my stop, transfixed by its empty fingers.

My senses sharpen; I can taste the difference

Between types of silence, can hear colors

In strangers’ voices on the morning train.

Last night in half-darkness, two bodies

Creating a new language without words—

Your heartbeat against mine, an intimate morse code

Spelling out secrets I can only decipher

When the practical self steps aside,

When time becomes circular instead of linear.

My midnight self would seem alien

To those who know only my daylight competence,

How easily I navigate social contracts,

How neatly I fold conversations into acceptable shapes.

I live between domains, a dual citizen

With incomplete papers. The poem waits

In the white space between calendar entries,

In the breath between spoken sentences,

In the pause before answering a simple question,

The poem continues whether I’m attending or not,

Like blood flowing through chambers of the heart,

Sustaining life even when I forget to marvel at it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

BIPOLAR RITUALS: A KITCHEN ELEGY by Paarmita Vedi

Bipolar is a guest— arriving uninvited and overstaying.

Bipolar is a recipe— forgetting itself halfway.

I inherited the craft of cooking,

and simmering myself into psychosis from my mother.

In mania, I become the goddess of garnishes—

swirling turmeric and ginger through the air,

blessing the house with flavour and frenzy.

Gold-caramelized onions, crackling coriander—

Ma said the art of love resided in dum biryani.

The tropical land I come from breathes mustard oil

like incense through sun-split kitchens.

Ginger, turmeric, red chilies, panchphoran, hing—

the vast Purvanchal sky sleeps inside my spice-drawer.

A cup of chai, cinnamon-kissed and cardamom-sweet—

sings soft melodies for the monsoon memories.

I never believed Ma

when she said that kitchen is a temple.

To me, it’s a mausoleum—

Of scent, Of ritual, Of women who never ate first.

Of women burned in kitchen by festivals,

who wiped their stained hands on new sarees,

while men laughed over second helpings.

My apartment has no prayer room.

The only chanting: the refrigerator hum,

guarding milk from curdling, guarding my medicines.

Another inheritance—Ma’s illness hidden in warped steel tiffins,

her reflection distorted; the zari of her silk

pallu frayed by sharp-edged shame.

On good days, I wake before dawn to soak rajma,

hands rhythmic, ancestral.

I roast peaches in honey. Braid dough,

crack eggs mid-air like choreography.

The kitchen becomes a sanctuary—

friends arrive— we discuss art and anxiety,

in oversized cotton T-shirts and boxers.

Sautéing philosophical debates with cumin.

Marinating poetries with rosemary and wine

But then there are days when milk stains

in the saucepan turn stubborn like my depression.

I forget how to boil water.

The sink swells with guilt: grease-slick pans, red-tinged plates,

spoons stained by unfinished meals—

growing mold like a forgotten language.

A half-cut onion dries like a wound

I never finished opening.

The knives glint —not sharp, just honest.

Entice and invite me with a promise of release.

I cook like I’m trying

to reassemble my mother’s body from memory.

Some days I eat from the packet:

dry cereal, bread crumbs, old chips.

My tongue forgets the alphabet of flavor.

Even hunger feels performative.

Even water tastes tired.

I sit holding a potato like it might save me.

On such days my partner takes a flight

Just to wipe my kitchen shelves while I stay curled on the floor.

I fall in love like it’s resistance.

Like it’s generational healing.

He brushes the hair from my eyes

with hands that don’t flinch at soapy water.

Sometimes, we kiss beside the gas stove.

he lifts me onto the counter, and I collapse—

soft, dissolving like a saffron thread in warm milk.

And I think of Ma—

how she might have envied this kind of freedom,

how intimacy enters the kitchen now,

and not just hunger.

Even a ruined kitchen, I’ve learned,

can smell like a beginning.

The Kitchen Remembers by Anurag Mohanty

I.

The mustard fish stain on my collar, grandma’s thumbprint pressed into the

steel cutlery,

a low rumbling snarl mixed with mirth,

her voice still chastising from the stove:

"Eat, eat, you skeleton!", after the third serving.

I scrape the plate clean now,

years too late.

II.

Mother’s Dalma,

turmeric lumps dissolving in the broth,

the way she’d sweat,

dewdrops on a winter dawn,

as she stirred the world into tenderness.

I never learned the rhythm,

but my clumsy hands

still try to replicate

the alchemy of her patience.

III.

Father’s chai,

the precise angle of his wrist

pouring hope into cracked cups,

the cardamom pods bursting

like petite grenades of warmth.

My own brew is bitter,

but I drink it standing,

trying to mimic his spent gait,

a lifetime of shade, the familiar lump of the shoulders,

that held up whole worlds,

drinking the dregs of his evaporated dreams, like the steam fogging the kettle

IV.

The mutton kasha,

three hours of chewing,

a lifetime of laughter.

The pan still bears the scars

of violent stirs to keep the fat and the fatigue, from sticking to my memory.

I keep it not to cook,

but to remember

how love sometimes

needs teeth.

V.

Poda pitha on winter visits,

the jaggery leaking

like a secret confession,

her hands folding the dough

over all the stories I never got to hear -

now turned to ashes -

forever ricocheting off the horizon.

I burn mine black,

but the smell still carries me

back to her kitchen,

where failure was allowed

but hunger was not.

VI.

Tonight: Instant noodles at midnight,

the rolled dough pale as my excuses.

Through the window,

the city shivers under streetlights.

I stir in an extra chilli,

just to feel something.

VII.

The kitchen forgives

all my small betrayals,

the spoiled milk,

the abandoned meal prep,

the recipes I’ll never master.

It keeps offering

its stubborn warmth,

its simmering insistence.

VIII.

When I die,

let the autopsy report show

mustard oil in my veins,

tea leaves in my lungs,

and every unspoken thank you

lodged between my ribs

like fishbones.

IX.

The fridge light flickers.

A lemon shrivels

into something resembling

a heart.

I close the door gently,

watching the light go out just before a thud, a metaphor for forgotten recipes,

and dusty stoves that will never be illuminated.

Some hungers

were never meant

to be solved.