A Cup of Fine Tea: Robert Masterson’s “To the State Electrical Worker”

Robert Masterson’s “To the State Electrical Worker” [Read the poem here] (Published in Issue #15 of Cha)

–This post is written by Tammy Ho.

Robert Masterson’s “To the State Electrical Worker” is an evocative and powerful exploration of tragedy and our callous response to it. The poem recalls W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” but while Auden’s work is about how people can be oblivious to events and suffering around them, Masterson’s poem shows how the plight of others is often treated as little more than public spectacle.¹

As the title of Masterson’s poem makes clear, the piece is dedicated to a particular but unnamed Chinese electrical worker. The title flows into the prologue and it is here that we learn about the worker’s shocking death. Written in a factual style, the introduction informs us that the man was ‘killed while working on a giant steel pylon supporting the massive power lines spanning the Wei He River‘. Already, in this statement, we see the themes of the poem emerging. At first glance, the event described, while both dramatic and tragic, would seem to be a relatively minor one in the history of China. Indeed, the use of phrases such as ‘giant steel pylon’ and ‘massive power lines’ effectively signal the insignificance of the individual when compared to the nation’s industrial might.

Yet, despite the modest background of the man, his electrocution has captured the attention of the poet and his persona. It is unclear whether the speaker in the poem was present at the scene or is simply recreating an event he has read about. He nevertheless continues to obsess over the accident, the line ‘I still now as I did then wonder’ (L1; variations: L10, L20) suggesting a temporal distance between the worker’s death and the writing of the poem. After the intervening time, he is still unable to come to a conclusion about what triggered the event and he muses, ‘Who knows, who will ever know what caused your fatal spark’ (L7).

The persona imagines ‘the brilliant arc that clenched you tight, convulsed in one long spasm when / everything inside you jammed up with electricity rampant and when / you began to smolder’ (L8-L10). Here, the poet beautifully captures the physicality of the event and it is easy to picture the worker’s suffering. The persona also wonders about the man’s mental state, asking whether ‘you even noticed you were on fire’ (L11). Whether or not the worker is fully aware of his situation, the persona does present him as a kind of reverse witness to his own death, asking what it must have looked like while ‘you incandescent, /eyeballs ribboned with blue fire’, watched as the city ‘pulsed, hot and dusty’ below (L2-L3; L5).

The city also looks up to watch the man. The river bridge below was ‘jammed both ways’ in a ‘typical post-revolutionary rush hour’ (L12-L13) but still, the dying worker proves enough of a spectacle for ‘a quarter of a million people’ to stop their bicycles and ‘put one leg on the pavement so they could safely stare up goggle-eyed / and open-mouthed’ (L14-L16). In this description, the poet provides a sense that the crowd is formed of jaded and unfeeling bystanders who find diversion in a stranger’s misfortune. It is perhaps easy to overstate the cynicism of the crowd as there is little that any one individual can do to rescue the man. Is it worse to ignore a dying man you cannot help or watch his demise? In the use of phrases such as ‘goggle-eyed’ and ‘open-mouthed’, which are intended to convey the onlookers’ rapt attention, the poet, whether consciously or not, also has the crowd empathetically mirror the worker’s own physical state, his ‘eyeballs ribboned with blue fire’ (L3) and his twisting convulsions.

Still, for the commuters, the sight of a man ‘two hundred feet in the air who twitched’ and ‘was never coming down’ (L17-L18) is little more than ‘something different’ (L16) to be experienced, a living (or maybe dying) piece of art. This takes us back to Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” which describes Brueghel’s Icarus. In Auden’s take on this painting, everyone and ‘everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ of Icarus’s falling from the sky. In Masterson’s poem, however, everyone watches the disaster quite leisurely and unlike in “Musee”, in which we are not privy to Icarus’s final thoughts, here we see the poet at least tries to imagine the victim’s experiences.

The final stanza begins with a moral judgment: ‘The wrongness of this all is huge’ (L19). Presumably the speaker is referring to the indifference of the crowd towards the electrical worker or perhaps the indifference of Chinese society generally towards individuals. (This poem takes on new meaning in light of the event in Guangdong in which a toddler was run over twice and ignored by twenty passers-by before being helped.) But are the persona and poet in “To the State Electrical Worker” also speaking about their own guilt in exploiting the event? Although they are sympathetic recorders of the accident, they too are in some sense using the worker’s death. This is perhaps somewhat overstated, as there is an honest attempt in the poem to capture the electrical worker’s final moments, moments which may have otherwise been lost to history.

As the stanza progresses, the persona wonders ‘what it must seem / to you there among the wires thrumming harsh’, as ‘the river silver /and thin’ passed below (L20-L21). From this image, the speaker pulls out to imagine the worker’s place in the vast history of the Wei He River and China, saying that the view is reminiscent of a scroll painting of the same location a thousand years ago, ‘now hanging in a temple’ (L25), except that the ancient mists have been replaced by ‘diesel smoke from idle engines’ (L23). In this final aestheticization of the event, is the poet suggesting that “To the State Electrical Worker” is an attempt to capture the man’s life in art? Or is he suggesting that this particular tragedy is insignificant when compared to the history of the city and river? Or is it something else? The poem leaves it up to the reader to decide.

-

¹My thanks to Professor Douglas Kerr who pointed out the relevance of Auden’s poem.
- 

Robert Masterson is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher and the author of Garnish Trouble (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber Press, 2008) and Trial by Water (Dog Running Wild Press, 1982). His creative work has appeared in numerous publications and on numerous websites throughout the world. Masterson’s teaching has taken him to the People’s Republic of China and penal institutions. He received the 1987 Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of New Mexico and the first Ted Berrigan Scholarship from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993. An English professor at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College campus, Masterson holds both a BA and an MA (with distinction) in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; and an academic certificate from Shaanxi Normal University in the People’s Republic of China. 

-

A Cup of Fine Tea: Greg Santos’s “Siem Reap, Cambodia”

Greg Santos’s “Siem Reap, Cambodia” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #10 of Cha)

–This post is written by Tammy Ho.

Greg Santos’s poem “Siem Reap, Cambodia” opens with a close third-person description of a girl leaving her home city: ‘Before stepping into a taxi / a young girl struggles to take the city with her’ (L1-L2). The word ‘struggles’ reveals that the girl is reluctant to depart and is trying to capture as much of ‘the city she will no longer call home’ (L9) as possible.

What the young girl is trying to take in is vividly described in the second stanza; it provides the reader with a portrayal of Siem Reap which works on many of our senses: ‘Warm, sticky air’ (touch), ‘scent of fragrant rice’, ‘pungent odor of dry fish’ (smell), ‘raw flesh hung on butchers’ hooks’ (sight), ‘squawking of chickens’, ‘crescendo of rickshaws, scooters, bicycles’ (hearing).

Yet, there is no time for the girl to carefully catalogue everything and her memory of the city will ultimately be incomplete. Even as she ‘speeds away’, the city is already beginning to recede ‘into memory’ (L10). The girl may already be realising that we can only take snippets of our past with us, never the whole record. There is also a sense in this description of the city’s slipping into memory that, for the girl, one can never go back home.

But it is not only her old life that is disappearing, the country as a whole is undergoing metamorphosis. As she travels through ‘the rolling countryside’ (L11), we see that it is now empty, no longer ‘dotted by women tending to the paddies’ (L11) or ‘children splashing among water buffalo’ (L13). These previously common scenes are now a thing of the past. The lines pointedly suggest that like the young girl, the women and children too are also affected, possibly by the same forces that have driven her from the city.

What these forces are is revealed in the evocative phrases which come next: ‘echoes of distant missiles’ (L14) and ‘murders of crows’ that ‘dive into reddened fields’ (L15). The image of crows diving into blood-soaked fields is particularly effective as it echoes the motion and destruction of missiles landing. Although we are never explicitly told what these events are, one can safely assume that they are describing Cambodia’s recent troubled history, either the civil war or the period under the Khmer Rouge. In some sense, it does not matter. Historical forces act upon common people like the girl. No matter who is responsible for the missiles, the effect is the same: she must flee her home.

Next, the poem switches perspective slightly and we see that there are witnesses to the girl’s flight. The faces of Angkor ‘watch sadly’ (L16) as ‘another one of their children flees’ (L18). But these stony visages not only scrutinise the young girl, but also observe the wider events in action as they see ‘their city’ crumble (L17)–’their city’ here referring to both the ancient and slowly decaying city of Angkor (a Sanskrit word which itself means ‘city’) and the more quickly deteriorating Siem Reap. There is a nice contrast of historic times here: the long history of the ruins from a once great empire and the rapid disintegration of modern Cambodia.

Yet, it is the final lines which reveal the true witness to the events described: the speaker of the poem is in fact the young girl’s unborn child. In other words, the poem has been told from the perspective of a foetus, a very close third-person narrator indeed. It is only when the reader realises the speaker’s true identity that the subtle foreshadowing that has been occurring throughout the poem becomes evident. For example, in the second stanza, note the description of Siem Reap as ‘warm’, ‘sticky’, ‘comforting’, ‘pungent’ and ‘raw’, all of which suggest a womb. And as the stanza progresses towards ‘squawking’, then a ‘crescendo’, it is almost as if the young mother herself is being born, forever ejected from the womb of Siem Reap. Likewise, the women and children who have disappeared from the paddies in the third stanza suggest that it is not only the the young mother who is fleeing but also her child.

With the shocking revelation that the speaker is an unborn child,¹ the reader might be left with a sense that both the mother and child will survive. The image of a baby is almost always a metaphor for new beginnings and new lives. And if not read closely, the poem may seem as if it is being narrated from a point in the future looking back. However, this is an illusion as the foetus is in fact using the present tense to tell us current events instead of recalling the story from a safe distance. The mother and child may survive but they may equally end up being killed directly after the poem ends.

However, I am inclined towards the happy ending. The words ‘gently growing’ in the final line do provide a sense of a new start. Or, maybe I just want to hope that even as another one of Angkor’s children flees, it is to a better place.
- 

¹Margaret Atwood’s “This Is a Photograph of Me” also employs an unusual speaker. Do you know other poems that use interesting speakers? Tell us in a comment.
- 

Greg Santos [website], author of TWEET TWEET TWEET (Corrupt Press, 2011), is a poet originally from Montreal. He is the poetry editor of pax americana and his debut poetry collection The Emperor’s Sofa (DC Books, 2010) was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. Santos lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife and daughter. 

-

A cup of fine tea: Sumana Roy’s “Love: Made in China”

Sumana Roy’s ” Love: Made in China” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #14 of Cha) 

-This post by Rumjhum Biswas was awarded the First Prize in the Fine Tea Competition 2011.

Those who were children in India during the years when ‘Made in China’ not only spelt quality at a better price, but a superior brand as well, will immediately be able to relate to this poem. But perhaps the persona came from a later time, when ‘Made in China’ merely spelt inexpensive, enough for the pockets of convent going school children — ‘Lunch was martyrdom /we escaped at his cheap store’ (L14-L15).

Whatever the era, the story of children sacrificing their lunch money to go foraging in a toy shop is a familiar one. The poet does not name the place. Yet I get a sense of hills beyond, in a town that is closer to the Himalayas, where Chinese-made toys would be more abundant, and the toy (shop) keeper would be either of Chinese or Tibetan origin, sporting a beard like Chinese lace, wispy, with gentle tendrils floating down. The shop draws ‘pig-tailed heads in’ (L11) — ah! Now we know they are girls, school girls! Now we begin to get a whiff of the ‘garlic-clove trail’ (L26). We begin to understand why, in the very first stanza, we drew a shiver, not quite daring to stare up ‘eyeball to eyeball’ (L5) into eyes whose ‘eyelids were fans / that cooled magma beds’ (L8-L9) of lust seething beneath heavy lids.

“Love: Made in China” is no love story. The poet sets the atmosphere immediately after the title with opening lines — ‘He was a part-time prophet / a full-time love clerk’ (L1-L2) — that draw darkness down like a thick curtain. The persona takes over right after, gripping the reader’s hands hard as she tumbles down into that dark place where the innocent sound of coins jingling in eager pockets meet the ‘footstep’ (L27) and ‘bubble gum scented(his) whisper’ (L30) yet all the while maintaining a cold distance, as if the child in the poem no longer meant anything to her. It is almost as if the persona has changed loyalties or camps, and this feeling becomes stronger as the poem progresses, but still feels compelled to go back to the place where it all began. The poem tells a story, of violation and betrayal, in the very place that is supposed to bring childish glee and unwrap imagination. The poet knows that and skilfully weaves words from a normal world into images of cold terror. The persona, having plunged into painful memory now holds it up like a mirror:

His hand in my pocket:
it was rape of a tree.
Then flood on the tongue –
a faithful Lhasa lake.
His China store was a wedding
night bedroom –
touch was free.
A paedophile’s patience.
(L31-L38)

There, she has uttered the word — ‘paedophile’! And nothing is real afterwards, except for the distant voices of children innocently playing The Farmer’s in the Den, unwary of the real den, where terror lurks. Then it is time to move forward, grow, learn… how and what does the persona grow and learn? What face does the persona present to the world afterwards? All we can be sure of is that the persona ‘forsook ribbons /… grew immune /…changed pockets’ (L49-L53). She tells us that ‘love was ice’ (L52), and then gives a glimpse of what the experience has done to her, where (her) ‘adulthood was a new vice’ (L55). The persona confesses that she ‘remains loyal’ — to what? Her terrible secret? To her violator? The images flash and subside almost instantaneously, because ‘love was betrayal’ (L58)… Now we know, surely we know, we understand, how a child would adore a keeper of toys, be lured in, and then be blackmailed into keeping the secret of ‘flood on the tongue – / a faithful Lhasa lake’ (L33-L34)

Lhasa lake? Chinese lace? These two images, placed far apart in the poem, suddenly conjure up a picture beyond that of child, children’s games and paedophilia. There is suddenly an undercurrent of something much larger, where bones become as malleable as bread — visualize humans beaten to pulp — and saliva induced from pain filling mouths like soup. Love was terror: ‘Made in China’ signifying the emotions of not a child but a people. And the last lines — ‘Love was betrayal: /”Made in China”‘ (59-60) begins to sound like a larger betrayal, perhaps one that came at great cost and painful coercion.

In Sumana Roy’s poem “Love: Made in China”, a scorching childhood incident becomes the metaphor for something else.

- 

Sumana Roy teaches at the Department of Humanities, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College. An early draft of her first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. Her poems, fiction and essays have appeared in 21 Under 40 (Zubaan), The New Anthem (Westland), Pratilipi, Caravan, Asia Writes, Himal Southasian, Biblio, OPEN, Tehelka, among other places. [Also see Roy's Cha profile.]

-

A cup of fine tea: Maysa Vang’s “Between Her and Me”

-
Maysa Vang’s “Between Her and Me” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #11 of Cha) 

-This post by Marybeth Rua-Larsen was awarded the Second Prize in the Fine Tea Competition 2011.

-

What comes between mothers and daughters? Nothing and everything, as Maysa Vang’s poem “Between Her and Me” eloquently illustrates. With spare and direct language, Vang describes a loving relationship, but one in transition, one where a daughter builds her own life as an artist while acknowledging her mother’s hard work and sacrifice to get her there. A common enough theme, but Vang transcends the common with her layered images of separation and use of simple language to convey powerful emotion.

We all seek to separate from our parents and lead independent lives, with some of us being more successful than others. Achieving success hinges on both parties acknowledging that the separation must occur and then allowing it. On the surface, the poem’s speaker describes a quiet moment as she takes care of her mother’s personal needs — scraping a callus off her foot with ‘a two-sided razor blade’ (L1). It’s a vivid image, but it’s more than that. The fact that the mother hands her daughter the blade suggests that the mother gives permission for the separation, that this is the time they have been working toward. The two-sided razor also suggests the daughter’s readiness to separate. She accepts the blade and makes the cut, and by cutting the callus away from ‘under her foot’ (L3), the daughter will, in a sense, no longer be under her mother’s foot. She will lead a more independent life, and one that can offer her more than ‘rice’ and ‘poultry’ (L15).

Even small shifts in diction seem to have larger implications, such as Vang choosing the more distant, third-person ‘her’ to reference the speaker’s mother in the title and then shifting to the more intimate ‘mom’ in line one. By using both terms in close proximity, Vang evokes a relationship in flux, showing both a ‘pulling away’ (her) and a loving relationship (mom). There is a push and pull of language, with the speaker searching for the best way to describe their relationship, a way to be separate from her mother while remaining close to her. ‘Mom’ or even ‘mother’ in the title would have provided much more intimacy, but it would not have signalled the struggle with separation which is at the heart of the poem.

As the daughter removes her mother’s callus, she shares details from her printmaking class, a class her mother made possible by taking menial jobs like bundling flyers (L8–L9). Vang uses printmaking to build on her imagery of separation since an inked plate is pressed to paper to create the print and then is permanently separated from it. The mother becomes her daughter’s canvas, or in this case a copper plate, and when the calluses are carved away, the artist separates herself from the plate, and the work of art stands on its own. Toward the end of the poem, when Vang writes ‘Her spine curls forward as she leans in / closer and hair falls like wine poured /down her shoulders in silver and black’ (L19–L21), she describes the speaker’s mother as a work of art, thereby recognizing the mother’s long hours assembling the postal sacks that will allow her daughter to live an artist’s life and avoid, hopefully, working in a factory.

The mother says little and doesn’t respond to her daughter’s discussion of art, suggesting that their different levels of education also separate them, and that the gap in their understanding of the world may only grow wider as the daughter continues her education. The mother may choose silence because she has never seen a piece by Rembrandt or is unfamiliar with the process of printmaking and doesn’t know what to say. In this case, however, silence is acceptance since the mother ‘pray[ed] that I might speak an unbroken / English tongue and never return to the factory’ (L17–L18). As her daughter achieves her goals, the mother accepts and adapts to the resulting changes, and she’s content to listen as her daughter takes on the role of artist.

Like mothers the world over, who want better for their daughters than they had themselves, the mother here earns her calluses with hard work and knows that her daughter’s continued education will create a certain distance or separation between them; still, she gives her all and asks little in return, willing to do whatever it takes to ensure her daughter has a happier, easier life. The poem balances love against change, and Vang asserts that love endures even as it separates. When the mother says, ‘it doesn’t hurt anymore… /do my left foot’ (L22–L23), she speaks as much to the physical pain of removing the next callus as she does to the emotional pain for the distance that will grow between them. The mother understands there is more separation and pain to come, but she is strong enough — they both are — to withstand it, and any subsequent changes in the future. And isn’t that what we hope for? Love that doesn’t call attention to itself, that isn’t a bargain-in-the-making… that simply is, despite change.

- 

Maysa Vang is a 24-year old Hmong artist, poet and freelance writer. She was born and raised in the inner cities of Minnesota after her parents migrated to the United States. A recent college graduate, she enjoys traveling, making art and trying exotic foods with good friends. 

-

Sea-burns: Anindita Sengupta’s “Arambol, Goa”

-
Anindita Sengupta’s “Arambol, Goa” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #3 of Cha) 

-This post by Sumana Roy was awarded the Third Prize in the Fine Tea Competition 2011.

-

The sea is an unrhymed sonnet in every lover, every parasite feeding on an incessant wet dream. For we might leave our souls behind on some dirty laundry trips, but water we carry with us at all times. Water carries us to wherever we want to go to, pushing us up mountains, defying gravity, melting footsteps into sweat, crushing fingertips into strange juices of insanity. I came to Anindita Sengupta’s poem, “Arambol, Goa”, to be a sailor. I’d tired of land, of its animals and grass. It was slipperiness I wanted. I’d been anchored too long, and for too little. I’d looked at lighthouses from land, and without consequence. I wanted a life at sea, I wanted a stake in its uneven journeys and its intangible undulations, I wanted to feed on the uncertainty of the horizon. I wanted to be, in all squeezed senses, ‘at sea’. Land was a silver cage, its seasons too predictable, its loves too fenced, its words too tongue-tied. The sea was a coin which would flip to my mood. Or so I hoped. And so, I came to sea.

Anindita’s poem is less about a life in the sea in Goa than it is about an escape from water. Timid violence lurks in every run-on line, something moves in every couplet, motion is an internal punctuation, and yet the viewer’s eyes are still. The beach in Goa is like a sentence crowded with thoughts, and yet, after all, it is only a sentence on a printed page, and even though it has the capacity to move, it cannot move. And so, I remain on land. Its immovability crawls back into my surname, its different gravities into my palm. The cell phone beeps, vibrates, warns, withdraws and then nags again. I only wait to be washed by the sea, washed off all the regimes of land. I’m a convert without a religion. Water is a priest with a promise. Until the promise changes to blur. The lighthouse becomes a direction-amnesiac.

Anindita’s poem, her sea, the ‘hashish in the air’ (L1), and its loop of expectation, ‘is a dancing / thing’ (L1-L2). There is a pattern to the movements in the poem: like Newton’s action-reaction binary, the ‘I’ in her poem reacts to the happenings on the beach. The girl’s hands are ‘like two shells in sleep’ (L3), the bartender brings his foot down on a crab. Reaction? ‘I eat [a] tuna salad’ (L6). The boys on the beach turn over in their sleep, ‘the one-eyed man’ (L8) cups his face. Reaction? ‘A blue boat is a blemish / I could rub away’ (L11-L12).

This illusory quiet, like a child’s crayon doodle of the sea, is inescapable, and so I surrender. I mistake it, willingly, for peace. I think of all the promises made to me by men who wore their love like tattoos, who knew my weakness for the sea. They all promised the sea, and so their promises come like slices fitting in together, like the pieces of a birthday cake that have been taken back from eaters. That makes my sea a temporary mosaic, a prism which catches a new light as I turn it in my eyes. I abandon this sea. It is not mine, not any longer. The man with whom I now share the sunrise has no fishing net. He has fishing-rod eyes instead. When he opens his eyes every morning, the previous night’s catch erupts in them. I get knife and salt, and I kill for meat though never for food. I kill them to keep them alive — how much could dreams and the sea hold?

The bartender
raises his foot and brings it down on a

crab, spilling its meat onto the sand, leaving
a pattern in entrails.
(L3-L6) 

And, hence, the leftovers. Dreams spill over in surplus too often into our sunlit lives. They need washing, they need washing. I get soap and clothes-clips. Leftovers leave such stubborn stains. I scrub the insides of dreams — mine, and everyone else’s about me. Water forfeits all claims. They move in the soft breeze, they whisper in a new language. We abandon each other. Dreams are such orphans.

Water is a runaway bride. Water is a coattail I love to step on. Water is a religion by which I mark my footprints. After the day’s spelling competitions, I surrender to Anindita’s poem again. I read it as if it were the last page of my horoscope. And then I find it: ‘In the distance, a blue boat is a blemish / I could rub away, a // transgression’ (L11-L13).

I had so long been looking only for oars, for paddles, for steam. I was looking at water as if it were a perfection, a mirror without internal refraction. It was to be my antidote to the regimes of land, and it had failed me. I had held it in a glass, on my skin, in my hair, on my tongue, a crest and trough of prepositions, and I’d expected the tiny dewdrop to be my private planet. How wrong I’d been. I hadn’t climbed on water, on gargling uncertainties, on choppy fantasies. I hadn’t been a ‘blue boat’ (L11). Only water can wash water. I hadn’t tried to wash myself with myself. I had expected people, and the fountains of events they brought into my life, to be detergents. In the process, I had become bubble-land.

Now I became a boat, a ‘blue boat’ that gives the horizon the texture of hope and the symbolism of communion. I was not a real boat, only a blue boat with red-piping dreams. I was a boat in a child’s drawing. I could be ‘rubbed’ away. I was ‘a transgression’. I was a Saturday morning art school invention. Blue was the colour of my insanity, of my water dreams. An angry child could kill me. An art teacher could kill me. And water, that bowl of liquid which gives ‘water colour’ its first name, could kill me in a single flood. Water could be my poison. And I’d thought it Noah’s ark!

I still go to the beach with wet feet, the ant like sand gives my feet their mariner’s compass. The beach, instead of being fed with an iterant wetness, the chubbiness of water stroking its margins of existence, ‘burn(s) in its silent, unstoppable way’ (L14). I sit on the beach that the poem sat on, we burn together, the poem and I, the girl continues to sleep with her shell-hands, one-eyed men behave like mermen. But where is water? And so now, I go to the sea to burn. ‘Such violence / on gentle shores is common’ (L9-L10).

- 

Anindita Sengupta‘s [website] poetry has appeared in Muse India, Talking Poetry, Kritya and In Other Voices (an anthology by Delhi Poetree). She was the winner of the Toto Awards for Creative Writing in 2008. When not penning verse, she works for the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) and consults with Fida, an international development organisation. She also writes on arts, culture and development for various newspapers. Deeply committed to gender issues, she is founder and editor of Ultra Violet, India’s first online community of feminists. 

-