Two Poems

By Paulami Sengupta

Limits

My womb rides a taxi in a new city
Filled with an unwholesome penchant for strangers.

Cobwebs knit themselves into promising patterns of baby lives.
Look!
Lovers on a bike without helmets.
When will I reach, brother?
One who drives the car knows my limits.

Where there was blood once, there is flesh.
Where there were rosters, there are dancers.
Where there is dryness, there is someone to say ‘hydration is a priority’.
If brokers call, can water supply be far behind?
Look!
The sea opens
With an orange pop.

Bye Bye

Bye bye
Black blood, blackbirds.

My red, brown, thread-like selves
Trickling out on streets, corridors, schools.
I transferred my epithets to them.
Those droplets were tactless and anxious.
Streams of silence
With occasional spurts of courage and undying self-pity.
How I loved this riverine side of me!

My very own showers doused me with love
In crowded markets and rooms.
Glistening exhibits in my own museum of everything I said under my breath.

I boarded the metro
Or huddled in a corner of a lift
Being a blood woman
Lest my sweating hand spoils the anthem of crisply ironed shirts.
On those days, I wore my blood on my sleeves.
Stains that I would never let go.

Note: These two poems were published in Paulami’s book of poems, Maximum Love in Patel Nagar and Other Poems by Red River Press, New Delhi, in August this year.

Painting by Shatarupa Burman

Bio:
Paulami Sengupta is a publishing professional based in Kolkata, India. Her poems (in English and Bengali) and translations have been published in The Dreaming Machine, Nether, Cold Noon, and The Sunflower Literary Collective. One of her poems has been selected for Rucksack: Global Poetry Patchwork Project, curated by Antje Stehn and Mamata Sagar. She has co-translated the Bengali edition of Salome: Woman of Valour by Adeena Karasick (Boibhashik Publications, 2020). Her recent collection of Bengali poems (under her pen name Anjashi) is titled Bayosandhir Haraf (Boibhashik Publications, 2021).

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