Editor’s Note
Vijay Seshadri’s poem, ‘Imaginary Number,’ ends with the lines: The soul / like the square of minus 1, / is an impossibility that has its uses. The language in Ajay Kumar’s poems reminds me of such a negative within a negative, replete with marvelous impossibilities. In a way, these poems carry the logic of daydreams—visions one can have with their eyes open, wide-awake. The speaker feels and moves concretely but in a language that, through its restraint and directness, turns the act of writing embodiment into something more amorphous and free-floating. This sentiment, this fantastical logic resides in the language as well as in the “aboutness” of lines such as: remember my mother burning / the mattress on which she dreamt she was burning? or i wear a shirt over the shirt i forgot i was / wearing and my body flies from skin to hide or you drink smoke, i breathe / diesel, both of us lighter than the rain / in which we hid in the waterdrum. I shall leave you to find your own daydreams in these poems, like an eye hammocked in an eye.
—Devanshi Khetarpal
The Bombay Literary Magazine
it’s like we’re bathing a baby: me tilting
the cooler, you filling it with water.
after the last cigarette is lit, its box
becomes the ashtray. we’re crawled up
inside: you drink smoke, i breathe
diesel, both of us lighter than the rain
in which we hid in the waterdrum,
forgetting who was the denner.
the past is here, sandpapered, paperweighed.
who’ll go get it like a good god?
once your smile peeled away from its address
it roamed around your body as free as we were
once. as i stood in the line to accept your share
of pills i felt as if i were waiting for a prison call.
who’d call me at times like this? i saw your smile
hiding between the seconds it took for your blood
to course back uptube after the drip was over.
i would’ve caught it, like fire, if i didn’t have to
call the nurse. i would’ve caught it if the doctor
had told us what i told the nurse: it’s over.
remember the egg carton you once ashed in
and how it caught fire? remember my mother burning
the mattress on which she dreamt she was burning?
sometimes i think i’m still trying, barefoot,
to stamp it out, without catching fire.
my mother repeats this story:
how once she opened her eyes
from a coma and saw through
a parting in the green curtain
a man burning.
(it was during the first world war
that they moved from white to green.
it took a war to know how blood
stood out.)
imagine a forest fire but inside an urn.
i wear a shirt over the shirt i forgot i was
wearing and my body flies from skin to hide.
your dosed face is the carcass of a veil
that i’ve seen my mother wear. when i hold
my hand out to you it is a shovel still
mudded from my mother’s grave but you
still hold on. she did too. you and her rise
like shovels wedged in the sand shifting
beneath the waves of my retreat. all i ask
of you is to wear me like the buttonmissing
shirt and go look for the buttons because
the war’s over now and we’re here, rooting,
for you, our tree.
Author | Ajay Kumar
Ajay Kumar is the author of the e-chapbook balancing acts (Yavanika Press, 2023). His works have appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, The Bombay Review, Usawa, and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among others. He received the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2024 and was twice longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award.
