Anindita Mukherjee

Pamenar Press
3 days ago
2 min read

Anindita Mukherjee is a poet and translator. Her literary oeuvre includes How Silkworms Break Their Eggs: Selected Poems (2024) by Mridul Dasgupta, and a chapbook titled Nothing and Variations, besides publications in other literary magazines like Madras Courier, The Antonym, periodicties: a journal of poetry and poetics and are upcoming in The Guernica. She is a PhD student in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Don’t ask me Why

Don’t ask me why she changed course

paraded with walking palms, clung

to a liquid plan— gathered water

talons, or grew formless icicles.

The sailing traditions didn’t save her.

It is a saga now lost to

sheepish rocks, hardly do

the waters look teal or treacherous.

Don’t ask me why she could be

a crisis lacking the compass’s care

This, briny female fatigue, I can tell you, is

what a reverse run is not, what a raving return is not.

I have Roots

For Joy Ladin, on a Friday

I have reverse roots growing on my head,

flinching, wincing through my Stygian

locks. I look like Medusa upside down.

I am where never a bud blossomed.

For my arid anchors, they put on an act:

I am not their Spring. They are not my sprouts.

For the denouement, I will play Winter.

These brief pursuits

These brief

pursuits,

have nothing

for life.

Yet, I have seen

the dry

tufts bribe

the hedges

for some water.

If a village

atheist imagines

the autumn

mist around

God, believe

her. If harness

ribs pluck

winter plumage

for the next

summer, tell

them

you don’t

remember

the seasons

before

the law.

The world

didn’t go

black

yesterday.

Origins

I seldom speak of origins: to evoke, ascertain, and then swallow—a game my palate holds seriously against the crooked tongue. Wherever I look: my thoughts bow with the slant of trees, now dwarfed by the wind’s whim.

Like ancient trees, I have grown tired of mosses and prayers. There is a purpose in calling creepers overgrown. At least it’s a name that is not geographical.

When I uproot them, the clumped soil grows green with moist years. They live as traces under mere human passing. They look like faith without seasons.

Let me tell you: In the fall zone, this is how you live. You can wear arboreal love, take vows of vines, roll against each other, and still not realize that each leaf boat has its own oar.

Snags, stumps, and dead woods become your nicknames. On you sit squirrels and salamanders. They speak of origins endlessly.

Refusing March

The end of March is a madhouse—

Suddenly I have to swallow crinkled cones

with a clenched grin. But I am not alone, a wild

cavalcade puts the whale’s weight on me.

Suddenly I have to count moons for Neap tides.

‘Nep’ which means ‘nipped in the bud’ which

means a fresh wound which means a queen bee

has broken the colony without her hymnal

drone, which means in the end a frenzied hum

Has refused April’s march. On such a topical day