Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
1. Something small to say and mostly us to say it.
2. We gather dessert spoons in sticky bouquets.
3. We hear disturbance in the basement
and still we take a candle and go down.
4. We’re innocent, if only to ourselves
and want to know the strangeness of our houses.
5. No-one breathes until the hemlines go up.
6. Off with our glasses and, oh my, we are delivered
to ourselves like roses. 7. It’s the softness
of our bodies. 8. It’s all of us laid end-to-end
in a moebius band of skin & celluloid
that kicks the whole shebang off. 9.
We know when to run by the state of our shoes.
10. If everyone’s shoes are sweet we stay. 11.
We may come like someone’s pulled a rip-
cord from our bellies and go, YES. Or
12. A lawyer enters. E.g. did we say no
in the way Plato himself would say no?
13. Here’s our archive of equivocal sounds.
14. The original problem of course is Mother.
15. Or The Workplace. 16. Anyway, to do with
mothers or employment will be why some guy’s
still creeping up our shady stair like black mould.
17. He’ll call it retribution and they’ll count this.
18. So we work real hard to be good astronauts
and cyborgs. Lining up our gleaming corsetry
across the world’s bridge! 19. Sister, warrior,
this hypothesis will oust us from the family.
20. Never mind, it’s only true in movies.
21. Will someone press the little button—