Poems, Photography and Collage Works – Anindita Sengupta

TREE WOMAN

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WILDING

1

King’s Canyon

Lights stake the path /
my daughter graphs

ghostly leaves. Globes of dew
adhere to every shaft

of light, streaming /
Sequoia needles

like a benediction
even as, in every life, some rain

must rear up, a reconnaissance rare
and gentle as the eyes

of a hare / An eyelash is the distance
between fall

and resurrection. We talk of Icarus,
his poor scorched waxwings,

his father who lived as synonym
for regret.

The next day, turkeys parade,
as the bent afternoon

pursues its refinements /
What if, what if—

some days, the mind spirals
in conjecture, the hypothesis

of tears. I name things
so I will understand them /

I project too much. An incandescent
sort of living

is what she wants,
someone once said of me,

meaning it was indecent, meaning
I would only ever come to harm /

and yet, the bold absolute,
the hunger of days.

2

Joshua Tree

A dog in an RV window bathed in blues
and golds / the leaf of a Joshua Tree, all spine.

Resilience, they say, can be learned.
Any succulent will tell you—

to store water is an art,
to hold anything in place

for a later moment must take
such insouciance /

My breath frees in this climate so harsh,
it is the stuff of lust,

the ache in the throat,
the hands grasping my neck.

The mad shout of oasis,
a magician’s trick, a clock righting wrongs,

a cloak of wellness, a well
of ever-giving, I wade to a log,
algae scumming my shoes, its bark
so rich, so thick and grave.

How might skin compensate
for what is missing?

An exotic bird yodels
as bearded palms loom

like wise ones. The lens
is a looking glass

I could cascade through.
Canyon rock striated in bands

like avenues of the brain. Ravens
punctuate the air—and are those my limbs

reappearing as chiaroscuro,
things made entirely of light?

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The Question of Birds

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Anindita Sengupta is the author of Only the Forest Knows (Paperwall, 2022), Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall, 2016) and City of Water (Sahitya Akademi, 2010). She has received fellowship and awards from the Charles Wallace Trust, the International Reporting Project, Muse India, and TFA India. Her work is in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Witness (Red River), and journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Plume, Salamander, Folio, One, Feral, and others. She grew up in Mumbai and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. 

Website: www.aninditasengupta.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onlytheforestknows/

Photography at https://www.instagram.com/lilithandblues/

Banner Art: King’s Canyon / Sequioa National Park. A photo image by Anindita Sengupta (c) 2024.