Nikita Parik: The recipient of Nissim International Poetry Prize II 2020, Nikita Parik holds a Master's in Linguistics, a three year diploma in French, and another Master’s in English. Diacritics of Desire (2019) is her debut book of poems, followed by Amour and Apocalypse (2020), a novel in translation. She was the former Assistant Editor of Ethos Literary Journal, and currently edits EKL Review. Her works have appeared in Rattle, U City Review, The Alipore Post, Vayavya, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Bengaluru Review, and others.
AFFLICTION
One
summer, I inhaled
your
absence with the breeze.
It
has infested my lungs.
Its
wet heaviness has since
lingered,
cohabiting, coexisting,
as
if in a symbiotic relationship.
Some
nights, it becomes
the
giloy creeper that had died
under
my watch and never
bore
leaves. On said nights,
it
climbs my throat, chokes
my
breath, silently strangles
my
ability for language.
On
other days, I sneeze some
of
it out onto paper, call it poetry.
To
transcend grief, you must
allow
it to fill you.
But
how do you
transcend
absences?
***
Notes:
*Giloy-
A herbaceous vine (Tinospora Cordifolia)
Progression
This
aurora, once rosa
multiflora,
now sleeps
in
morbid orchids, dead
foraminifera.
I trace
your
face in florid hues,
in
Neelkamal's blues,
in
the drops of dew on
wilted
Gudhals. The nights
are
aquiver, much like
that
black river from one
town
of sinners I escaped
from.
Its drones, its
silent
phones, are
dulcet
tones of a death-trance.
But
the flowers!
The
flowers, they tell,
that
a sanguine scull
will
beat this lull,
and
this aurora,
now
dead foraminifera,
will
once again be
rosa
multiflora.
Notes:
*Neelkamal-
Blue water Lily
*Gudhal-
Red hibiscus
CO-ORDINATES
OF HIRAETH: 27°36'25"N 75°9'36"E
My
grandfather's ancestral house
is
a smirk
on
the face of
urban
connectivity.
It
is cool water
from
mud-pitchers
during
desert summers,
a
rhododendron
at
dawn, liquid gold
when
the sun sets.
My
grandfather's ancestral house
used
to have turbaned men
speaking
in tongues
of
earthy bajra and chaas,
a
community-well
where
women sang
in
colors of gangaur,
a
little courtyard
where
little children
played
pitthu all summer.
My
grandfather's ancestral house
is
now a hairline fracture
in
the ankle
of
modernity:
stone
and rubble,
plants
growing through
cement,
stench
of
abandonment. It is
comatosed
hours, poetry in paralysis,
a
calendar of absences.
Notes:
Bajra-
Millet
Chaas-
buttermilk
Gangaur-
An Indian festival
Pitthu-
a game played with rounded stones
Sound
of a Scream
(After
the supercylone that ravaged the city, Kolkata 2020)
This
night splinters the throat
of
a scream, then chokes it
into
unbecoming. It drowns
in
the cyclonic winds, a mask
covering
its muted mouth.
This
scream tries to navigate
its
way through a darkness
that's
tar; black, black tar coating
city-walls
with electricity-less pasts.
This
water that's rising
in
the streets prods this scream
for
a memory it doesn't possess.
It
wants to run away. Only,
there's
no place to run to.
It
tumbles on the sloping
wet
surface of my house-
broken
glass, uprooted trees
sharp
metals,
and
teaches the world that there's
more
blood than sound
to
some kinds of screams.
Ingression
(For Sufjan Stevens)
An
album stirs,
a
sound enters
its
own heartbeat.
(ii)
A
slice of thunder
in
a wet
synthscape;
I
climb
that
mountain
trailing
within.
(iii)
Can
you touch
the
ousia of that
which
once was?
(Iv)
This
rupture has
holed
our collective
ataraxia
forever,
But
won't you still
weave
hope out of your
