2 poems in Prachya Review + a bunch of forthcoming news

 Hi Folks, 

So sometimes the banshee takes a break from wailing about love-lorndom and portending death, and the ghost takes a break from the usual haunting and stalking. I have 2 environment- related poems in Prachya's 'green' issue, a journal from Bangladesh managed by Shafinur Shafin. You can read them here

In a bunch of other forthcoming news, I am signing a contract with Queer Ink publishers for publication of my campus-based novel, The Yellow Wall, dealing with queer and autistic sexuality and trauma depression blah blah and well, college life. Only I'm keeping fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong like no major disagreements while editing and stuff... hope everything goes smoothly and the book can be published! 

I also have a bunch of other stuff that's probably forthcoming--- don't worry, I get more than my fair share of rejections probably, both professional and personal, so I dunno how some of the banshee's wails are getting accepted right now but I have 2 short speculative fiction pieces coming out, all about berserk banshees and other creatures (and queer and autistic sexuality!), and a flash fiction piece about an impostor I met online who taunts and harasses me because the impostor actually knows all personal details about me, and then this suicide poem that's been accepted for the yearbook of indian english poetry. So you'll hear about all this in good time as and when it comes out. 

So The Yellow Wall needs to be edited and published, I have this Berserk Banshees short stories thingy ongoing, and this Sapphic Epistles series of love-letters to poets, writers, artists, singers, actors and other creatives on themes of sexualities and mental illnesses (have no clue where it's going but hopefully somewhere), and this imaginary little novella in my head about autistic people set on saturn, well it begins from saturn but our protagonist comes down to this imaginary river island in the middle of guwahati, anyway this story really is non-existent as of now. Also, non-existent academic ideas on autistic/neurodivergent sexuality, and another one on place and memory, but these are a bunch of dreams unless a bit of luck makes them materialise before the banshee dies. 

If there's a lull in between, I might post something here from the past 3 years when my blog was hibernating. 

Okay, enough! Putting the 2 Prachya poems below:

A Peepul Tree Leaf

The Peepul Tree by the Ganga
outside my grandparents' house
became for me, the Kadamb tree
by the Yamuna, in the hindi poem
my mother always read out to us.
A peepul tree is home.
A peepul leaf is movement.
Wherever whenever I see
a leaf fluttering amidst stillness
I know it is a peepul leaf
the stillness of  home  found in its movement.

Carnivorous Cavern

Water swirled, milled around, whispered,
roared. Eroded. Penetrating the deep cracks
of earth. As deep as roots of trees.
Water that came from far away frozen icelands
where sheet upon sheet of ice melted,
under the glare of the hot burning sweltering sun
and gases which made the earth nauseous
and turned it sick into water. An abundance of water
now filled the oceans. The first floods were in the oceans. 
The oceans overspilled their boundaries,
encroached upon land. The oceans ate up the land.
The swirling waters were persistent. They loosened
up the earth, the soil swept it into the ocean.
And the water created a cavern. Below the tree.
A cavern of roots, always buried in the earth,
suddenly exposed to air. A cavern with roots as temple pillars, 
which humans had pillaged and pilloried. The water ate up the land.
Underground roots were now exposed to air.
The tree still clung on desperately to its roots,
to life. Resisting gravity. Resisting being swept out into the ocean,
 resisting death. Its frail tenacity is combating men.