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The globe has warmed itself into a boil.
People have died in a flood
that draped its saree into a tunnel.
A war somewhere in the West is wearing the sack cloth
of the wheat it drowned into its pit.
More than a 100 trans men have decided to tackle beauty
by its tassels via a legal intervention.
A wisp of land rising in the far east
is asking for something that the stove in the kitchen
has been warming up my tea with: normalcy.
A woman realized a few days ago
that she shouldn’t have burnt bridges
with her family: The husband hadn’t reciprocated—
not even after a C-section of twins.
A shell remains of what Mother was
in the 1980s. The skeleton she hung
in her closet tore up all her lesson plans
and revelled in being the backbencher.
He left two years ago and took
her identity along as well: It’s six feet
below the place where she praises the One
who bound her to that very skeleton.
Meanwhile, I’ve been searching through
the pockmarks and wrinkles of acquaintances
for a friend I disassembled away four years ago.
And I still scrub my face
from my larynx and let it lie,
down to the tune of:
“Hi hi! I’m okay; how are you?”
Garfield’s a freelance writer/editor/teacher/podcaster. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai and the CertTESOL from Trinity College London. In a career spanning over 20 years, he has copyedited Digit, a technology magazine; edited research publications for Cactus Communications; designed blended elearning courses for Tata Interactive Systems, Tata Power, Capgemini, Lionbridge, and Emeritus Institute of Management; and written technical documentation for IBM and Rolta. He has also conducted business-writing and analytical-thinking sessions at Larsen and Toubro and has taught the verbal section of the GMAT and SAT. Garfield has completed a season of About What You Say: A podcast about words.
He also runs a poetry podcast called I Could Think of Verse, which is about poems in all shapes and sizes. The podcast won second place in the Anchor (by Spotify)—Spotlight podcast challenge in January 2023. His poems were published in the ‘Language is a Queer Thing’ anthology brought out by Verve Poetry Press in collaboration with British Council and The Queer Muslim Project (Delhi, India) and were performed at the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival 2022 at Birmingham. His poems have also been published in Visual Verse and in Harana Poetry.
