Your fate is written on your spine,
even more than it is
contrived on your palms.
Because everytime,
you lift what isn’t destined for you,
more than your hands your spine will ache.
My country is outlined with kohl,
and every netizen on it’s physical
map frame is a teardrop.
Everytime we attempt crossing
it’s border, we roll down on it’s palevioletred cheeks,
swimming through the sewage,
across its nape like a marine fugitive.
The children of our republic haven’t grown up
listening to folklores of tooth fairies.
Rather we were narrated
the legends of tongue wizard.
And so we cut our tongues every night
to wake up next morning to Azaadi
under our pillow covers.
However if we were to wake up with azaadi
under our pillow covers, we must
sleep the night first.
We cannot rewrite
our destiny, we can just edit it.
I am too young to understand God’s scramble,
He gave the butterfly wings without winds.
He is clever enough to pickpocket
g and d, and so every time he “wins”
Every autumn in my courtyard is an enjoyment,
and my summers in exile are a living album of the apple tree in our verandah,
and skinny dipping in Satluj.
Perhaps winters never end,
they have managed to escape into our nostrils,
everything around us smells cold.
Revolts measure the degree of massacres.
Stop building juveniles, because the one who would commit a crime,
must have lost his childhood long back.
All the letters a pigeon fails to
deliver on the right threshold,
leaves a ringlet scar around his ankle.
Alas, for the pigeons of my town.

Ananya Aneja

Ananya means the rarest of all, I find refuge in the nub of poetry. I believe, words can even bring a dead to life and daydream about fairytales, Turkish tea and Arabic poems all day long. I love bringing revolution with my poems. I write about women, men and their tectonic differences. Poetry is the echo of my voice.