An Ordinary Contemplation
I cut my bangs from a screen tutorial,
as if Kālidāsa whispered of rivers in hair.
I bake cakes for my own storm-hunger,
since Wordsworth never warned me about dirty kitchens.
You knock too loud, scattering my crumbs—
this mess is mine, not Milton’s fall.
My feet sink where Homer’s ships once sailed,
but I’m no Helen, only late for class.
A street child laughs, sharper than Shelley’s skylark—
will I ever laugh that free?
Perhaps Byron’s gloom brews in my bitter tea,
while teens call me “aunty” on Shyambazar buses.
Old lanes forget me, so I let them be,
though Tagore still hums through rusted shop signs.
Maybe Eliot hid here, between dust and neon,
when survival asked, do I need you?
Oh no, thank you—
I’m fine.
Whirlwind of Sinking Water
The night drifts inward through the half-open window,
its breath clouding the rim of my sink.
Thoughts gather, like soap water thick
with the ghost of what was touched too long.
Plates gleam—
moons rinsed of appetite.
I trace their edges,
the skin of remembrances
lipping beneath my nails.
The air smells of detergent, and forgetting.
You would have drawn me with eyes closed,
the mind’s charcoal
smudging along the contour of my name.
like Monet’s dusk dissolving,
or Kahlo’s heart stitched in its own fire.
Memory, that soft thief, renders me again—
blurred, unblameable.
The sink fills, an ocean rehearsing its small, private tempests.
My lace, steeped in colour and sin,
clings to the spine of heat.
Ash drifts where the photograph burned.
Your lighter sleeps in its brass silence.
I watch my reflection
unmake itself
in the ripple’s uncertain grammar.
On the screen, the world fractures—
a city flaring, a river made of ash.
Smoke licks the margins of distance,
and missiles that punctuate the sky.
Here, only the hiss of water endures,
faithful and unaware. I turn the tap—
the stream stutters to a stop.
Silence, too, must be dried with care.
Somewhere, beneath the tiles, a faint hum of remorse travels,
the kind that belongs to no one,
and stains everything it touches.
Anindita Basak is a poet and researcher from Kolkata, currently pursuing a B.A. (Hons.) in English at Charuchandra College, University of Calcutta. Her poems have appeared in multiple anthologies, magazines, and websites, most recently in The Hooghly Review. Her work explores desire, shame, and selfhood within the frameworks of gender and societal expectation.