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Du(a)l and Other Poems: Priyanka Kapoor

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    Priyanka Kapoor is currently working as a Deputy Chief Content Producer at HT City, Hindustan Times. Her work has been published on platforms such as The Indian Quarterly, Hakara, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, The Alipore Post and Phantom Kangaroo among others. She was shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award and The Brooklyn Poets’ Fellowship for her poetry. Recently, her poems were featured in the Alipore x Nivaala anthology (Memories on a Plate) and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2020-21) (edited by Sukrita Paul and Vinita Agrawal).

Engraving by Johann Ulrich Kraus (1690)

D u (a) l

Things keep happening
O what is new to foretell–
scratching his soft beard,
Tiresias slips into his twin-bed
and dreams of a shepherd
in a song of reaping,
that is,
neither to sow
nor to sell;
but the snakes soon unravel.

***

I t s  b o d y

Oh look
it begins again
in sadder places
when the cave becomes
sun-percolated bareness,
and there is a buzz of flies–
look–
at the swindlers
swarming
to eat sadness with their bare hands.

***

Varo Remedios – Les Feuilles Mortes

The Last Door

There is an ineptitude 
in excess of feelings
that devour all words,
just as they are encountered by a large door
painted with a medieval-mourning,
clothed in a monk-brown;
it is really not strange
for me to be deeply be in love
and to be found at this gate–
it is a segue
doubly-enshrined

by a belief that there is no higher altitude at all
by a disbelief in yet another higher altitude
like Meaning,
eternally slipped away from the mouth of the language.

***

Horizon

There is a reaching out to close the door
the man looks for a knob–
his hands reach out to the ceiling
past the moon
past the stars
past the stars above the stars,
where does the eye end,
in you or in me?

The vicious gaze,
Where does it stop?

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