E-Paper
Sing, Slivered Tongue: Read more poems by women, themed on trauma
A letter to a transgender child; a missive for a parent; a poem about a new mother, newly alone... read excerpts from the new collection.
Trauma was chosen as the theme of Sing, Slivered Tongue, since it encompasses experiences typically relegated to silence. And yet trauma has, through history, been a persistent element of the female experience, says co-editor Lopamudra Basu. Read two poems from the curated collection of 68.
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THE PRESENT
by Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey
1.
thirteen years of this same name
with a few million different versions
to use in love, jokes, threats, loving
2.
when they decide for a new name
another parent tells me that a name
is like a present, no one has to like it
3.
just because you gave it to them...
they know what’s best for them,
they get to decide if they want a new name.
4.
then they do decide for a new name—
“you know this name’s unisex, right?”
“but—it still fits wrong,” they say. So
5.
when they decided for a new name,
I find I’m delighted to have an excuse
to look at lists of baby names again
6.
with their new name, we learned they
can ask teachers to use the new one
but can’t officially change it at school—
7.
that’s another year with the same name
...but people ask us how to pronounce it
(because both names are from Sanskrit)
8.
we’re tricksters this first year with the new
name: just tell them the
old name is said like the name you picked,
I say. I’m loved
9.
more in this first year with their new name
it’s like they spread their prayers like wings
these are small things, but they can fly now
10.
when they decided on this new name,
I... was really relieved the new name
began kind of same way that their old one did—
11.
so in this first year with the new name—
I can catch myself before I land wrong.
“Doesn’t Elliot Page have a name like that?”
12.
“I don’t even remember”—they’re saying—
what it was, they’re in the present; I’m
rewarded with them happy in this year
13.
with just a new name
***
NAVIGATION
by Bhaswati Ghosh
You came with varied geographies on your face.
I was exhausted from
birthing, but not enough to stop
speculating on the amusing afterlife
the maps on your visage
would assume.
Inside me throbbed the song of busy cicadas,
its tenor nippy, its notes
shrill with the sureness of a just-failed
marriage. My bed, neither wide nor rosy
needed to hold your tiny frame and
my head, big with worry. Turns out you
and I had the same forte. We knew survival.
On a horizon as blurry as my job prospects,
we coursed our way with the theatrical
ecstasy of dancing on a crooked road.
***
WHITE ROSES
by Lopamudra Basu
Today, I click on Kolkata Gifts Online and
order thirty white roses in a vase for you.
Ma sends me the photo of the roses
and tuberoses and the jasmine garland
all adorning your face today.
Two years ago, in that May of hell’s heat and destruction
there were no garlands. Flower sellers
banished from the city like vermin thought to spread
the plague, dying of thirst on the way, walking
hundreds of miles, sometimes with no shoes.
Today, life goes on as usual in New York, New Delhi
and Kolkata— do people even remember that
there was no firewood or earth to bury the dead?
No flights from Minneapolis or Chicago
not even a phone call to hear you in the hospital.
We have said often that we have to think
of it as a natural disaster, an earthquake
or a cyclone like Amphan that tore you away.
Except, it was not a forest fire and more a Chernobyl with many forewarnings.
Two years later, so many names whispered
by the wind, and so many lives like leaves
blown away. So many souls still unmourned
and some like the white roses
in the vase pressed forever in memory’s folds.
.
(Excerpted with permission from Sing, Slivered Tongue published by Yoda Press and edited by Feroza Jussawala and Lopamudra Basu; 2025)
