Poetry: ‘my poems will be drunk, truthful / and blunt like your beauty that cuts / through my skin and draws graffiti / on my bones like tattoos’
The following poems are excerpted from Sutputra Radheye’s collection Served Cold from the Refrigerator (Red River, 2026). The collection explores themes of class, caste, masculinity, love, faith, migration, and hybrid Bengali-Assamese identity, through poems rooted in contemporary Northeast India.
english
my english broken
my lord
i can’t put two sentence
together
without waiting for a pause
to translate in my mind
what would i have said
in my own language
sometimes i get confused
over has had been
and have had been
i don’t even understand
why do i need to write
if i were you
in place of if i was you
maybe my english is the reason
they laugh at me
my lord
i feel enslaved
like my grandfather felt
when the gora sahib came
to his village
but only this time
they are not white anymore
*
a night in the month of may
it was three 3 am
the moon reflected on the marble floors
as she smoked her third
sitting in the corner of the bed
the birds had gone to sleep
in their nests, there were no butterflies
flying around, no painter shouting
at his muse to come back to him
it was just me and her
on her bare back, i promised to
write a poem with my lips like
sahir wrote for his beloved amrita
sitting outside the taj mahal as he
was invited for a tea with shahjahan
who discouraged him by ridiculing
his words as he said nights like this
needs a taj itself
sahir and i disagreed
my poems will be drunk, truthful
and blunt like your beauty that cuts
through my skin and draws graffiti
on my bones like tattoos
after the promise was made, the only thing
your skin said to me was ‘don’t forget’
i haven’t forgotten
neither the night nor the promise
***
Sutputra Radheye is a poet whose latest collection Served Cold From The Refrigerator has been published by Red River Press in 2026.
