shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Shamayita Sen is a Delhi based poet, lecturer and PhD research candidate (Department of English, University of Delhi). She is the author of For the Hope of Spring: hybrid poems, and editor of Collegiality and Other Ballads: feminist poems by male and non-binary allies. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various avenues including One Sentence Poems, Muse India, Outlook India, Madras Courier, Usawa Literary Review, Setu, Book of Poetry of Dissent: WITNESS, and Khushk Zubaan Bebaak Jigar. She can be reached at: shamayita.sen@gmail.com.


Shamayita Sen


 

Dust
accumulated in the corners of her room melts into dreams of
captivity as she walks past cordons of trees swaying with the breeze
of mum's lullaby. This night is thick with sorrows housed in her
paintings—the ones she poured herself into after father's passing.
Often these paintings remind her of a dusty city in the foothills of
Aravalli. And certain images crawl over: memories of cars slowing
down mid-alley, pulling their tinted windows down, cat-calling, (a sad
mellow in the eyes of a passer-by, as mindfucked as her), asking for
directions. Winter rain runs off stories of grief, all this while curiously
collected in soft crevices of her skin. Sometimes this happens, then
that. She loses track of time. The sweet earthen pot overflows, guilty
with words and images too dry to swallow.