Poetry by Suhana Bhattacharya: ‘i measure distance / not in miles / but in the way my mother says “beta” / over a lagging call / where her voice arrives before her breath’

Poetry by Siddh Dutta: ‘Her hours went into my becoming, / cruel it feels now / to realize how freedom can vanish without chains. / How may one choose a cage / and call it duty?’

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’