Flight lasts only as long as there’s a taut tether to the earth—
a bond so tight, a brush to the throat would draw blood.
Descent is everywhere.
Dissent is our unmarried aunt Red
who once fled, peeling skin from forest mist
until, inside us, she became its very vine.
P.S. A letter arrived today—No post-mark
*
I hide in the uncertain heart of darkness.
And within it, search for you.
Darkness, even inside this empty expanse, whispers:
you are not alone—
you’ll stub your toe
on the table leg, the cupboard’s sharp corner.
*
Your tears aren’t real unless they fog my glasses.
If the mist is fine, I could write your name in it—
like the grey-sweatered man on a bus window,
scribbling ‘I hate you’ one winter morning.
When droplets grow heavy with sorrow,
they clasp hands
and leap from the bridge.
The fishing nets find no trace.
*
I understand the story that isn’t yours.
Emptiness is a familiar friend.
Inside that story, expectation crouches—
and anxiety gnaws at it.
Not like those glass herons,
tiptoeing into water without ever getting wet.
Tears—if only they obeyed
we’d be gods.
You’d hurl a slipper at the sky,
shouting: “Bring it back. Bring it back.”
*
What’s done is done.
And standing on our own chests, we still believe—
what will be, will be.
If the past writes the story,
then the present is just cast.
Who thinks of trees or stones?
They don’t die—not really.
*
You believe in darkness—because you’re alive.
If you were dead, wouldn’t fireflies glow in your eyes?
Living means sometimes exhaling in relief,
murmuring, ‘I survived.’
But the dead—they know:
the fire trucks screaming through the night—
this is the world of light.
And there's nowhere left to hide.
*
If no one wore masks, would we even know what one is?
Knowing ourselves makes uncertainty cling to our skin.
And no matter how we try—
we cannot see the mask we wear.
But let’s speak of the unspecific—
it’s filled with things:
a used condom in a cigarette pack,
a blue-throated bird’s feather,
a shard of lead—
and when a pin pierces the shoe sole,
the floor echoes like hooves.
Why would the blind worry about masks?
*
Silk longs to see itself woven across cotton.
Pain is silk—
it despises its own unfolding.
It won’t curl in a flame or melt—
it turns to ash.
Burn silk, and you’ll smell flesh.
The brain’s hunger center is wired
to the scent of scorched meat.
What’s seen isn’t the only truth.
If vision ruled,
no one’s mouth would water
at the smell of burning silk.
*
From the thread of fiber, the story of the needle begins.
A princess, embroidering a handkerchief,
Notices—suddenly, unknowingly—
a tulip blooming on her fingertip.
That stain of blood makes the story real—
just as flesh-scented emptiness escapes
silk’s body and slips into our noses.
*
This is my final word on emptiness.
Emptiness is ancient—and endless.
Everything we make, hoping to craft it,
becomes pain instead.
But pain is built differently—
its height, dental records, its eyes and skin—
none of them today resembles emptiness.
Sabyasachi Sanyal writes primarily in Bengali. He has served as an associate editor for the Avant-Garde Bangla poetry magazine “Kaurab” for nearly two decades, and was a key figure in developing the “Circumcontentive poetry movement” a formally experimental, translingual, multi-epistemological writing style that emerged from Kaurab and was featured in Jacket 2. His work has appeared or are forthcoming in numerous Bangla lit mags, Aufgabe, Action, Spectacle, the Ilanot Review, and the Inflectionist Review. A molecular Biologist by profession, Sabysachi now lives in Lucknow, India.