- half-lit classrooms/ january sunlight/tasting new words on my tongue/ words i will later make poems, out of
- this, this is not a love letter/i love you the way one falls in love with a painting/ across time and space, endlessly/though mythologies of longing/ letting go is a kind of slipping
- half-finished conversations in shadowy corridors/ my claustrophobic stories like ghosts in summer heat/the tragedy in being so close..yet invisible/ even in dreams, i am colourless
- and your voice, a cantillation and the sound of my name (something beautiful) and the bell ringing like a knell/ (all i ever wanted was a universe where time machines exist)
- waking up in a dreamed-up world, a mythical venice or a strange arabian city stolen from postcards or ancient stories whose endings we have lost, over the centuries, so we invent new and better ones/ false alarms/ in that universe, we are not so distant, you and i
- confession/ i never stopped to realize just how entangled i am, with vines of identifies and whims and dreams clinging onto the rusty, crumbling walls of my heart/ desperation, (i)solation, death/ i, the lonely half of a hyphenated word
- i sometimes speak of myself in the second person, only to lose myself/ if you and i/ if you were i/ the way words lose their meanings when you repeat them enough times/doors opening into doors opening into doors you were closing all the while/ not you, i meant i
- if i (not you) write a suicide note, it would read: i cry because i cannot make myself understood/ i who yearn to write love songs to the stars
- autumn playgrounds/swinging to strange heavens on rusty swings or sliding down to dusty hells of fallen leaves and memories/ there is no goodbye when imaginary friends die/ does anyone mourn for burnt diaries
- trapped in a world that no longer exists/ my loneliness is like an empty train station in the wee hours of night that waits impatiently for something, someone/ to happen;
Archita Mittra is a wordsmith and visual artist with a love for all things vintage and darkly fantastical. A student of English Literature at Jadavpur University, she is also pursuing a Diploma in Multimedia and Animation from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. She has won several writing contests and her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Quail Bell Magazine, eFiction India, Life In 10 Minutes, Teenage Wasteland Review and Tuck Magazine, among others. She occasionally practises as a tarot card reader.
You can read more of her work on https://thepolyphonicphoenix.wordpress.com/