Editor's Note
The first thing I noticed about Shivani Agrawal’s poems was not the words but the very scaffold holding them together. For me, Agrawal’s absolutely dexterous ability to experiment with form is the most exciting thing about these poems. Employing visual caesuras, encountering the silence & loudness of white space, challenging the left-margin, using the tabular form of a glossary: these are some of the heterogeneous choices with which the poet plays around with the blank page.
Agrawal’s poems feel fresh not only because of their formal spunk and inventiveness but also for how they nudge us, over and over, to rearrange our very gaze. For instance, if there’s a sense of crowding in ‘All Girls’ Girls’, there is a sense of space, both literal and figurative, in ‘The Year of Choosing Joy’. And in ‘After eight years…’ we’re challenged even further as readers not only to make our own connections across rows and columns but also to rethink how language rearranges into images and emotions. Most interestingly however, these poems blur the separation between a poem and its architecture. In true chicken-and-egg style, we will never know what came first, or indeed, where one ends and the other begins. The boundaries between the poem and the form are effectively blurred.
— Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
All girls’ girls
one. we held piss in for 48 hours. two. with my head on your shoulder, rocked asleep by the t-chjk t-chjk t-chjk of the indian railway system. three. window shutters pulled open. mouthfuls of green air watching farmlands whoosh. small towns, sometimes people on motorbikes. four. chai le lo chai le lo chai le lo chai garma garam chai. five. girls at an abandoned station with too big suitcases full bladders minimal upper body strength and a dream. six. all-girls’ girls. all the dreams – stashed phones and clean toilets and running away with– seven. roll drag kick break climb forty-five flights of stairs to arrive into light. eight. crammed into so many vans spiralling upward to dalhousie. nine. stars and stars and stars like you cannot see at home. ten. only pine and pine and pine and the full moon behind the hills. ten. only pine and moon and hill and girlhood in the backseat. ten. only hill and girls and girls taking turns to piss.
The Year of Choosing Joy
was actually the year of bad teeth and bad kidneys i discovered horrible truths about myself i couldnt love didnt want to didnt see any of that in the map
of my life i lost friends to
space
i had this shelf with safety pins and spare toothbrushes and
a bottle of zoloft
in order to not kill
myself i needed to make things: a sandwich a trip to kmart another
grief drained saturday playlist on spotify needed to drink neon
orange aperol and go on a very long walk needed to
stand shin-deep in the ocean to look at bird-mangled fish needed to
watch the sky turn princess frosting pink
neededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneededtoneeded to find ways to live i needed
to live
when joy was hard i wasnt without
i was with absence of
my jellyfish body bondi acid blue on the ocean floor i made my own joy
joy was always always always there even when it felt impossible in a life like mine
After eight years, one week and two days, my body stops disintegrating somewhere over the Pacific
After Franny Choi
Acknowledgments
Image credits: © Sadhna Prasad. Reproduced here with the artist’s permission. For more of her work, check out Sadhna’s Insta at @sadh.press.
Sadhna Prasad’s vibrant creations are found on street walls, buildings and commissioned spaces, often depicting young people going about their lives. As do Shivani Agrawal’s poems.
See also Lady Pink’s painting which accompanies Deborah Leipziger’s set of poems in this issue.
Author | SHIVANI AGRAWAL
SHIVANI AGRAWAL is a poet and editor from Bhopal, currently based in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is halfway through finishing a Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Waikato, and works part-time as a communications advisor. Her recent works are featured/forthcoming in Poetry Aotearoa, Mayhem Literary Journal, Mister Magazine, and The Alipore Post.