Last night’s left over spicy hakka noodles in soy sauce sits in a yellow pottery bowl, the fridge is a sanctuary of stories hoarded from neighbor’s houses. Fear has a new name invisible and fertile, highly combustible it breeds in us laying hard shelled eggs breakable but potent. Between an hour of dawn and few minutes of twilight lies the promising horizon of hope. The span of gravity before time is thawed, before the lips of Nature open and close, open and close to another day let us breathe in fresh air. The mynas are flocking in pairs perching on the window sill pecking at the scattered bits of bread. They peek inside curiously staring at blank faces of people uncertain like a hunted deer in a concrete jungle. The sky is an empty canvas waiting to be explored. The world has been sanitized with a brush of reality as we remain masked, gloved and anxious all day.

bad karma

the world is dying

every sunset

…

Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla is poet, translator and French teacher from Mumbai. Her poems are featured in the anthology ‘Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians’ by Sahitya Akademi, Red River Book of Haibun and ‘Open Your Eyes’. Her poem ‘Anagram’ won the 20 Commendation Prize at ‘The All India Poetry Competition'(New Delhi, India). She was awarded for The National Poetry Contest 2018 by Ræd Leaf Foundation for poetry and Allied Arts. She is the author of two books of poems ‘Invisible Eye’ and ‘The Empress’. Her poem won a special mention award in the Architectural Poetry Annual Competition by Architectural Journalism and Criticism 2020.