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confusing taco bell - purbasha roy





1.Confusing

____________



Like the hands in confusion for what to do standing

in a queue. Or with a taco bell reference done to me

in school years. My heart too is, on how to reciprocate

the love that comes on occasions favorable for 

the one showering it. The leaves have begun pave

their way back to deserted branches. Evening I

found the doorbell made no sound on pressing. 

Instead of the fix it demanded, I kept it ideal. I

behaved the way, I did see the climber stretch 

opposite the building's backyard. For the little

wilderness that survived the city encroachment.

I didn't disturb it's liveliness. Every night I see my

knees hold proud the childhood scars. I think about

how each has a place behind. Where my tiny body 

wandered for hunt of pleasure. Public park. Woodlot. 

Sidewalk. How inside each unconscious ache 

a beauty lies. Again I end my day in confusion.

The first time I had seen a puddle harden I felt

heartbroken. This feeling was as large as witness

a butterfly skip my home bougainvillea. And as 

small as taut bedsheet get the first crease after I

throw my handbag over it. I have no options

to choose from like a letter I wanted to scribble

 upon the courtyard of sky. So, I turned myself

quiet. And began forage of a place I could keep

my awareness as a rudderless boat. An idea to 

not listen to me. Nevertheless, things happen to 

me like directions purposed for an unforced 

migration. I become the crosswalk that refuses

outgrowth…but efforting has been a habit.









2.Broken Syllable

__________________



 Like a broken syllable from where emerges

a new meaning. From the cracked cement of 

verandah popped an inch long moss patch. Its

green juxtaposed against the off-white seemed

like a moment of forgiveness. A taco bell dream

that leaves me overwhelmed. Another story of

how we are blessed with breaths. This is an

unburdening like a monsoon over a field exacting

itself inside Indian thirst. How I am close to witness

something that leaves me thinking of a memory I 

made on a road find a bell-shaped purple flower. Its

clapper I discovered was a yellow carpel. Like a 

bright dream my body kept on hold to release in

the noon nap. It had a song and a delight framing

it. Like April hours around a lotus lake. Some 

days I shimmer across my sadness. Its algorithms

weaving sunshafts and moss threads. The pattern

like an authorless boat that arrived sailing on my

island of solitude. With an unstifled sonnet at the

glass-bottom smelling an old rain I hid in pencil box

















3.Poetry is here

________________


While I write this, in an Indian April summer

noon, a writer must be staring at an aspen leaf

and meditating about the mystery of its arrival.

I too had done once find a hibiscus leaf on the

windowsill, remembering there's no plant in the

entire neighborhood. Including ours. Somewhere 

on a typewriter,a poet clicks thoughts with a

symphonic sound. Like an image of taco bell not

knowing, what it is. And then a silence following

it, would resume hear a goat bleat outside the gate. 

Now in America where night blankets it, somewhere

verses behave obedient to a blank page. The same 

sky above all, us. The sentience with equal amount 

of surrender before a world hidden between this 

world. A kind of longing. Each one meandering in 

the sea of lexicon, to pluck word after word. How

 day-after-day of selections, the words never behave

 same-kind. Each verse a miracle never known before.

 What is poetry in ultimateness. A way to translate 

the body's and time's syntax mingling at a point

 industrious in its gesture of disappearing in jet-speed.





Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Logic(s), Romance Writers of America, The Archipelago, Mascara Literary Review, Channel, SUSPECT, Space and Time magazine, Strange Horizons, Acta Victoriana, Pulp Literary Review and elsewhere. She attained second position in the 8th Singapore Poetry Contest. Best of the Net Nominee.

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