POETRY

THE GREAT YUNNAN KINGDOM – Wumeng likes to sing after a few drinks, and he always sings the same old song. I’ve heard it many times, but still can’t remember a word of it. Wumeng dreams of building his own empire, calling it The Great Yunnan Kingdom, but the soberer he gets, the more his empire looks like a castle …

WHAT IF YOU SLEPT – What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven, and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had that flower in you hand. Ah, what then? http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140423532

IF YOU FORGET ME – I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that …

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE – All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining …

Christensen’s father was a tailor, and her mother a cook before her marriage, but Inger Christensen (1935/2009, born in Vejle Denmark), become experimentalists – in different way – one of Europe’s leading contemporary experimentalists. Her works include poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. She received numerous international literary awards. After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk, she turned to …

PARTING BEFORE DAYBREAK – First the day, then daybreak, and finally the time for parting. Local time in Beijing is 7 o’clock according to the TV. As a child, I liked to lie in bed and wait for daybreak, my silver broach stayed in its soft dormant curve. I counted my fingers, exactly ten. Almost daybreak, but no light in …

Exhibitions of her paintings have been many, but as a poet, she is new to the Indian literary scene. Originally from Kolkata, she to Paris at the age of 21, to paint, major in French literature at the Sorbonne. After nineteen years, she returned to India, to live in the river-laced village of Moira in Goa, where she painted and …

Tishani Doshi – graduated with a master’s degree in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins University – she is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer, and was born in the city of MADRAS in 1975, but currently she lives on a beach, between two fishing villages. Tishani’s debut novel (The pleasure seekers), was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize, and …

BURNT POEMS – I am a half-burnt poem. Yes, you guessed right, a girl’s love poem. Girls’ love poems have seldom escaped fire: father’s fire, brother’s fire, even mother’s, an heirloom. Only some girls half-escape: those half-charred ones, we call Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova or Kamala Das. Some girls, to escape fire, hide their desire under the veil of piety: …

HER SAFE HOUSE – Mother walking up a corridor with a stick, as frail as tissue paper, bunched on a stick. Moving up a corridor inch by inch, a hairball being pushed by a breeze, into her safe house, her sonless kitchen. BOMB SITE SEEN FROM A RAILWAY BRIDGE – As if the broken stumps were a girl’s starved shoulders: …