Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
From Insulae*
This is the room you always come back to. Twin bed, shuttered window, tiny desk. The walls have stayed a pale pink, you think, the crown molding white, and the toilet’s behind a cheap accordion door, next to a handheld showerhead and drain. Across the street, palms and giddy cries from a parochial courtyard. The sky is soft October blue, and, from here, the main train station is just a few blocks away, like being young. It hasn’t been renovated yet, and the one seer whose book you have with you isn’t dead. The seer you’re looking for, twenty years (but the distance between you and you now is longer). At first, of course, the city was a stranger. Soon after, the center. This is the room you always come back to. Here it is always warm, and everything’s just at the edge of beginning.
(Lt.) Literally ‘islands’. In ancient Rome, apartment buildings or city blocks.
Excerpted from Triptych: The Little Light That Escaped, Alexander Booth.