Poetry: Sriparna Mitra

Sriparna Mitra

Sound of Numbness

It’s happening again.

A queer numbness cascades through my veins,

As if a veil of oblivion

Settles over me,

Like a disabled fly

Over my depressed skin.

If indifference were a man,

He would, with his careless hands,

Pull me into

The realm of flesh,

Crack into the bones,

Hollow me out,

Make me an alien again

Before this world’s sage.

I rehearse smiling in the mirror,

But the image, in return,

Questions me the purpose

Of smiling,

As though I am an intruder.

Hence, the more my eyes traverse

With a meditative gaze,

Across the lands

Of gray indifference,

In search of nothingness,

The more I

Drown at a slow pace

Into the ethereal dark of sleep.

***

The Cotton Veil

I laggardly savour the celestial stew

of divinity.

And through sipping the esurient scraps of hope,

I worship the image of the formless.

Love is not a possession,

nor a caged breeze without rain.

Love is beyond any assumed definition,

beyond the peripheries of discriminated corpulence.

In the beauty of the ordinary,

in creation after an excruciating

extinction,

my words dissipate languorously

into the seeping staleness

of everyday discourse.

My words shed their skin;

they don’t remain mine anymore.

They become the cotton veil

for your piqued bruises.

***

Is the City Falling Short of Breath?

I stand still with tired breath,

while I feel the heat on my scalp.

The autos and rickshaws are crawling like old men,

dragging time with fragile wheels.

People are walking like they have nowhere to go

but are still heading somewhere.

I never ask about their destination.

The city feels heavy in the chest.

Oh, I forgot my inhaler again.

Asthma is a disobedient learner;

it never asks for permission.

But is the city falling short of breath?

Or is it just… procrastinating?

***

Bio: Sriparna Mitra is a poet from India with a Master’s in English Literature and Language and a B.Ed. She has cleared the NET JRF in English and finds inspiration in the subtleties of everyday emotion. Her poetry has been featured in Paradise on Earth: An International Anthology Volume II, Double Speak Online Literary Magazine, The Wise Owl Magazine and Piker Press Journal. Through lyrical expression, she seeks to capture the unsaid and the unseen in the human experience.

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Setu, June 2025