About Lahari
Lahari Mahalanabish (Chatterji) is a writer and poet from Kolkata, India and currently based in Sydney. She is the author of the recently published short story collection Tales of the Anointed Skeletons and Love (Ukiyoto Publishing) and One Hundred Poems (Writers Workshop, 2007). Tales of the Anointed Skeletons and Love had been nominated for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2023.
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Her short fiction was long-listed for the Grindstone International Short Story Prize (2020); poems were shortlisted for Passionfruit Poetry Prize (2023), Mslexia Poetry Competition 2021, Erbacce Prize Poetry Competition (2009 and 2010) and short story collections for Eyelands Book Awards (2019 and 2020). She also won Money Series Short Story Competition by TMYS Books (2021) and was among top 5 in Being Woman contest held by Story Mirror. Her short stories/poems have appeared in 14 anthologies and in several literary magazines/journals. A software engineer by profession, she blogs at http://theserpentacursedrhyme.blogspot.com..
On the Ridge
I.
She swims,
the water quivers to wakefulness
the surface yielding into rainbow-ripples,
encircling her like subjects around
a queen.
She walks,
tall tawny locking grasses
flex their blades away to tip towards
the wild-bud stem-matted earth
as she cleaves the scrubland
and paws defiantly at the winds
from the cracking ice mountains.
Her ancestors’
buried roars still echo
in the caverns between tapering roots
that web across the trailing creepers
before needling into the fleshy earth
her foremothers’ imprints lie
in some stripped out
strips of the old forest
scrolled around far-off branches
of its eldest trees that only she recognizes,
with sludgy smoke billowing between rickety trunks.
.
Her children
preened and permed in prisons
continents away,
their stripes snipped out of asymmetry,
straightened into bars that clinks
with the visitors’ fake bravado
and glints in the bug-pecked bulb light
at supper.
II.
Far from dusk,
sunlight clings on barks, but slips
and siphons off through unhealed wounds.
Swaying flowers on pendulum-stalks
unhinge camouflaged butterflies,
leaves wrenched off ashen branches
swirl down into the dug-out traps
as if to gauge their depth, as if to warn,
hive gassed bees pepper the pale yolk
of vanquished sun,
then haze the slipping crown
of hunching trees
silent songs fizz within sealed bird beaks.
They strike back
nimbus plug up the sky-specks pitting the canopy,
the water hole twitches, rain slops off its bank,
each stem a bed of rill, each leaf a wishing pool
the earth dissolves,
assailing the dryness of her mate’s blood.
Lightning sizzles the purple-bruised sky,
the lone tigress’s emboldened profile
on the ridge
as she claws into this realm (where she still lives),
shadowing the realm without.
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