Mongoose by Rohit Chakraborty

“An E. M. Forster paperback in the library had caused a bit of a stir among the Uprights. What other designation suited them better? Arrogant, heterosexual bastards. Never cowered nor bent. Proud and blissful in the glory of tradition wherein they nestled in the opposite gender’s pants. Their spines formed that menacing “S” which imitated a cobra with its spread hood, when observed from the side.
...READ MORE

hard to predict which way
the world’s wind tunnels—

already turbulent
amidst the thunder

The smoke that comes out
of my mouth is really
the spirit of my dead son
and dead wife

Jibbed, old hungers gnaw at your chance
arrival in gelidity. Gleed stirs up in you
my cutty-pipe image, and you laugh, louder
than required, adopting cachinnations as
a channel of expressing emotions that have
no business to be in our basket, as by now
I have peered you on the pentimento of
regrets. If this sounds cavalier, let me assure
you, I understand pain. It is my portmanteau.

Silhouette is the Genesis of a song
in aboriginal linguistic
as God’s eye became a stoke furnace
and our flicker of stronghold
along tobacco road
became a body of water
through the pipe of a Kabul
how do five digit of loins breath?

I welcome myself into gardens of strangers,
slipping past them as fluidly as sound.
The joggers kick my temples with their sweat.
The veiled women dress like burning cities.

Slipping past them as fluidly as sound,
my brain dry heaves at how
the veiled women dress. Like burning cities,
I am the remains of something beautiful.

My brain dry heaves at how
there was a time when it wasn't so stagnant.