I’m a poet & writer of absurdities. I have a daughter who loves singing Leonard Cohen along with me. I’m also the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS.
Originally from New Delhi, I now live in Blacksburg as an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. I write about the disintegration and re-emergence of selfhood through intergenerational family traumas, and rituals, both familiar and absurd, surrounding death and addiction. I’m interested in how language informs autonomy.
My first poetry collection, THIRST, is composed of over 50 poems profiling my father through hybrid forms (such as the interview, questionnaire, visual fragments, prose poems) and traditional forms (villanelle, ghazal, free verse). The poems attempt an obsessive portrait of another that eventually becomes a self-portrait.
A portion of this collection was a finalist for Diode, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Tusculum Review Chapbook Prizes, as well as shortlisted for the Rattle Chapbook prize. The full-length collection was also a finalist for the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize (The Journal), the Felix Pollack Poetry Prize (University of Wisconsin-Madison Press) and the Barrow Street Book Prize. Poems from this collection have appeared in Best New Poets, AGNI, Rattle, Plume, TAB, Poetry Ireland Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry Online, Frontier Poetry, The Margins, Southword and elsewhere.
Though borrowing heavily from personal experience, this collection is constructed with dream and distance. Rooted in the specific time and place of modern Northern India, the themes I explore radiate outwards, and hopefully, this work is as much a mirror as it is a memoir. I am attempting to forge a space for myself, an Indian poet of a fragmented, autocratic past directly marred by the colonial era, in the American poetry scene.
You do not mean this
as slang. Time, literally, stops
by your house, fucks your mom.
It’s not non-consensual, she
too is hungry to move below Time.
And she is open to alternatives.
You hear them all night,
their wails gag the walls,
the floorboards, the ceramic
of your bones. She has thrown
away her cloak and alarm clocks.
She measures dawn by absence
of desire, moon by rage
or sorrow. She does not measure
anything else—asafoetida for curry,
salt for meat, your fluctuating weight,
the distance between conception
and creation, banks and beggars,
thirst and pissing, how many islands
compose New Zealand—600
or 2, depends on how alone
you feel. Time, you hear her
murmur over the phone, offers
the most pussyblowing cunnilingus.
Time’s tongue knows tongues no man
has patience to learn. Do not mistake
any of this for metaphor.
She examines her hands all
evening, concludes one is larger
than the other. Symmetry is a myth,
like beauty, like DNA, like time
zones divorcing countries that waste
men on war. A waterfall
of bullets is the melody Time
whets its teeth with. You hate to end
a sentence like that. There is so
much time to think—think!
Everything will be over
by the time you walk
into her room, the orchestra
of their bodies having received
its applause, Time bowing down,
and your mom trying
to remember where she is
in her cycle.
First published in Strange Horizons, June 2023
Ana and I and the sky have a cold. Clouds are hiding in their underwear the remedy of the sun. You are grating ginger for tea, and birds are shedding feathers to warm us. Ana demands to go to the park so I take her to the park. Instead of the horse on the left, she sits on the back of the fish on the right. They swim across a river of grass. Out of the river, the fish falls into a coughing spell. Ana unzips her little bag and offers the fish a lozenge. She asks the fish to look up at the contrails. Then delivers the distracted fish back to the river. At two, my daughter is writing the book of mercy. At home, I make her chickpea flour pancakes. Around midnight she coughs in her sleep and an earthquake shatters Afghanistan. The tremors are felt here in our room in this city designed by Le Corbusier. The house snaredrums for thirty seconds. You Google if that’s too long for an earthquake. You pack our passports, iPads, Ana’s stuffed turtle she cannot sleep without, and the memory of the night we first made love in this room in a backpack. I carry Ana and her sleep in the crook of my arm. The stairway somehow has more steps than ever before. Outside, the trees on both sides sway like they’re high. The woman next door offers us to put Ana in her car as we wait for the aftershocks to pass. I want to buy the rights for the Indo-Australian tectonic plates. Everyone is walking back and forth in the cold, nervous street. I call my dad in Delhi who is drunk and did not feel the earthquake or has been feeling it for the last half hour. He passes the phone to mom who says: Dinner without you tastes like October. The street empties as people go back to their TVs. You hold my hand and ask me to look at the sky. Another breath and the moon disappears. On our way up the stairs, Ana wakes up for a blink to sneeze one long river of song, you whisper god bless you, and I think of the day, say god just did.
First published in Shenandoah, Fall 2023
They were two halves of an apple. They had their differences and acknowledged those—Akshita’s side was rich and red, whereas Akshar’s pale and green. The bruises on them were in different places and of different depths. The shape was fuller at her side, crooked at his. But in the end, their taste was similar, and their core had the same seeds.