Poetry by Kartikay Agarwal: ‘Will the last book of the last people to write books / (when all else is said) at the end just say ‘write to me’? // The wheel spins the pot to life, yet leaves no trace, / You be potter, mould life into my clay—write to me.’

Poetry by Bunny: ‘I dip the iris in soy / and watch the dark eat the color. / Still, through the stain, I see you.’

Poem by Anju Devadas R D: ‘Ink spills like blood, / blotting the margins of her name. / Each word a bone, / each sentence, / a noose of syntax.’

Poetry by Carol D’Souza: ‘Before the tabla taal of inevitability / kicks in the apocalypse, the first few bars / of this blue ghazal are clear notes / of what could have been.’

Poetry by Ayaan Halder: ‘And then the browning milk that has gushed into his shoes, and mine,  / Carries us over / To someone else’s pyre. / The wind, by then, has ravaged his leaf.’

Poetry by Parismita Kakati: ‘When they burn me by the river, my pyre ignites / with smoke that rises thick and not sandalwood sweet / A stench grapples the air, reeking of desire / like overripe fruit splitting under its own weight.’

Poems by Prahi Rajput: ‘the surviving curiosity / in descendant’s narrative is wrested from a ticket & one welcomes / the other through its foreign / door/translating displacement & dialect’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And why after that sun-dusked rainbow / Turned our eyes colour-blind // Why is it that your footprints in the dark, / Still lead me to that secret altar’

Poem by Anju Devadas R D: ‘They say the river hums here, / but no one sings along. / In this village, silence grows / like moss on every wall.’

Poems by Saurabh Suman: ‘in the music that declares the arrival of autumn— / the evening breeze caressing / almost dried-up leaves, / trembling as they cling to the stem’

Poetry by Sukrita Paul Kumar: ‘the golden sheen on the pines / beckons the waves of the grey ocean / and the silver arrows dart forth in unison’

Poems by Abhilipsa Sahoo: ‘Once, I was a little bird slowly blooming out of the warm embrace of the nest to learn the taste of first flight, believing that distance was proof of growth. Now I’m just plainly tired of being the burnt-out lamp on my parents’ windowsill’