Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










INVASIVE by Nandini Dhar

Cut open the apple –

hold the charred bank-note

in between your fingers;

in the imprints left behind by obliterated numbers,

track your way back to an orchard.

 

To trail after erasure – this

Way or that – is to reside

With the possibility of a slaughter. 

 

A genocide invents its own unnoticed 

rhythms – the jangling of coins where 

the slurping of tongues should be, a skin

bereft of bones, the sound 

of million footsteps stitching shut the barbed wire. 

 

That interdependent admonishment – an effort

to stare into your own eyes 

through the screen of a salon-window

is bound to end in a vanquished screech.

 

The barbed-wire furrow is a famished 

mother, kept alive

through half-propped guns. 

 

Cut open the apple –

Chew into shards the cauterized maps. 

 
 

NANDINI DHAR