America has patches On her patches And when the latches lock But the hinges fail The scale of false images Has to increase So distracted attention Can release reflected Dimensions of complexities And let pride hide The realities of shame Behind a constant need To blame the poor For not paying their share At the core of economics Where satire draws The comics too painful To laugh at Though the wrinkles Are ironed out For another chance to dream And dance And not notice The material Has become too thin To keep values warm Or to comfort the principles It takes to be Sensible enough To weave A pattern of hope That promises and provides More than despair.
Not Enough Time
There are many paths that lead To the ancient depth of solitude Where the weary arrive To survive their stories told Without morals to the fables Sitting at the tables by themselves Where their gaze glosses over With too much to remember And not enough time To relive it all Or to retrace the steps Along the distance of the trail.
While writing Conley Bottom: A Poemoir, The Recon Trilogy +1, Always Ready: Poems for a Life in the US Coast Guard, and (under Anonymous) Say Their Names, Ben White thought he was a poet. But he realised that he is not a poet at all. He is a witness. What he writes is testimony.
As the lights dim and the screen comes alive and we are embarked on the journey of two “laapataa ladies” (Phool and Jaya), we hear the insightful words of Manju Maasi to Phool: Iss desh mein sadiyon se ladkiyon ke saath ek fraud chal raha hai. Aur uska naam hai bhale ghar ki beti”. These powerful words of an old stall owner in a railway station illustrate the core message that Rao seeks to drive home with the film: the message of challenging the vicious patriarchy which is an entrenched part of the Hindi hinterland culture. Set in the fictious Nirmal Pradesh in 2001, the film follows the stories of two village girls who are swapped during a train journey because of their veils. The veil, in the film, assumes metaphorical and literal significance. Literally, it constricts and confines the woman and metaphorically it invisibilizes the woman, depriving her of her identity and her selfhood. Satire runs through the humor in the film and paves the way for a social commentary on the deep-rooted evils of patriarchy. Gender discrimination is a way of life for the women in the film where prejudice is so ingrained that if a man does not take dowry, he is told that he is full of “khot” or defect. Without indulging in pedagogic feminine discourse or slogan-inducing speeches, Kiran Rao peels off the layers of injustice and addresses the plight of innocent girls like Phool and Jaya.
In the film we meet two couples, the very innocent and in-love Phool and Dipak and the mismatched Jaya and Pradeep. The beauty of the film lies in this dual depiction of both marriages and men: while on the one hand, we have the naive Phool who is loved and cherished by Dipak, a simple and wonderfully big-hearted man, on the other hand, we see the clever Jaya trapped in a loveless alliance with the nefariously greedy and sinister Pradeep. This is one feminist film where all men are not vilified ogres or monsters. Instead, the film very credibly shows us, through the character of Dipak, that men can be wonderful. Dipak is progressive and liberal in both thought and action. Frantic after he discovers the swapping of the wives, Dipak runs from police station to politicians to railway platforms in search of his beloved Phool, the girl who he barely knows yet has become strongly attached to. For Phool, hardly out of her teens, to be stranded on a strange railway platform without her husband and protector is the worst of all nightmares. Confused and bewildered, she runs into Chotu who takes her to the station master; further confusion ensues as Phool is unable to even name her own village let alone the village of her in-laws. All she does remember is that the village is named after a flower. Chotu, in a hilarious turn of events, proceeds to name flowers one by one: Champa, Chameli, Dhatura., finally conceding, Phulwari ka sab phool khatam ho gaya par ye Phoolkumari ka sasural nahi mila. Finally, Phool is taken by Chotu to Manju Massi’s stall at the station where she slowly evolves under the matriarch’s influence: it is Manu Massi who makes her understand the hypocrisy of values she has been reared under. Slowly, Phool begins to question the training she has been given, wondering why girls are not given any “mauka” or opportunities and why they are made “lachar” or victims. Manju Maasi shows Phool her own capabilities and makes her realize the value of earning her own money.
Juxtaposed with Phool is the resourceful and feisty Jaya, the girl who desires a degree in organic farming so that she can transform agricultural techniques in her region. Willing to go to any lengths to gain an education and stand on her own feet, Jaya sees her swapping as an escape from the despicable Pradeep. She sells her jewels for her admission fees; Kiran Rao poignantly underscores the tactics girls have to resort to in rural India to gain the basic right of being educated, of being self-reliant. Even as Phool evolves under the tutelage of Manju Massi, Jaya helps the women around her evolve. We see how she makes Dipak’s sister-in-law realize how talented an artist she is and convinces Dipak’s mother to cook her favorite dish (“Kamal Kakri ki sabzi”) for herself even if her husband and son do not like it. Interspersed with the protagonists is an ensemble cast of minor figures who are as endearing as the main characters: there is the character of Ravi Kishan, the policeman who is willing to take bribes to file FIRs but who refuses to let Pradeep manhandle Jaya. Then there is the indomitable Manju Massi who speaks some of the most profound truths in the film; in her imitable style, Manju Massi educates Phool about one of the greatest lessons of life: “Apne Saath Khush rehana bahut mushkil ka kaam hai par ek baar ye koi seekh le to koi tumhe dukh nahi phoucha sakta”.
Heartfelt performances by the three debutantes and soulful music combine to make Laapataa Ladies a rare gem: a film that breaks the boundaries of stereotypes and entertains its viewers. Rich in color and rusticity, the film showcases the social culture of the Hindi heartland brilliantly. The film shows two faces of mutiny in women: in Jaya it is because of a genuinely bad husband while in Phool it is because of the circumstances she finds herself in. Yet, both women assert themselves in the midst of a crisis and that is where their triumph lies. The light-hearted touch in the film never lets it get bogged down by weighty preaching; instead, the film simply tells a story of two different women and through this story highlights the subjugation of women and the destruction of their dreams post marriage. Kiran Rao eschews any form of excess and in doing so drives her message home deeper. The evils of dowry, domestic violence and gender stereotypes are all touched upon by Rao without any fanfare or clamor. Ultimately, the” Laapataa Ladies” find themselves and in doing so rehabilitate not only their lives but also the lives of those around them. In a heartwarming scene, we see Manju Maasi eating the sweet made by Phool in sheer joy after Phool reaches her home. Jaya secures her own victory as she rides off to Dhera Dun for her farming degree with the blessings of Dipak and his family. The end of the film feels good because it shows us that emancipation for women is very much a real possibility and that to counter every chauvinistic Pradeep there is a loving and liberal Dipak. As Dipak says to Jaya at the end, “Sapnay dekhna kabhi galat nahi hota.
Somrita Misra is Assistant Professor in the Department of English in Chanchal College, Malda, West Bengal. She is a Potterhead, a researcher in children’s literature and a thorough bibliophile.
Fifteen days in Himachal Pradesh might sound a lot, but it’s too less in comparison to the enormous beauty they have over there. This beauty, like it includes their mountains, rivers, waterfalls, it’s also seen in their daily rural life. In the tapering roads of Nako Village, minimal living is the key. Humans co-living with their domestic animals is a common sight. The kids have their own touch of beauty from Mother Nature. The temples and monasteries are mostly borne from local and exclusive architectural style. If I hadn’t visited them, I wouldn’t have known the marvel of detailed design. And above all, the high snow covered mountains beautify them like no other, anything out there is incomplete without them, like they complete the pleasure of eyes.
Partha Saha started his photographic journey in 1995. Since then he has been felicitated with various awards, the most prestigious of which was the National Award on Child Education by National Literacy Mission of India. Several National level magazines and newspapers have published his photographs on different occasions during his career. He has been participating as mentor and judge in several events as well. Last year, he received the Best Photographer and Studio award by Rashtra Vijay Utsav 2022.
Many a time poetry is that astonishingly simple---
you captured in another continent in a photograph
the contrail of the horizon in your eyes on your lips an absentminded smile
my wistful sigh ‘How I wish I were there’
Your sand-hushed voice reassuring ‘You were’.
Gift
Returning from that metropolis you brought its river in your voice having soaked it all week on your tongue.
Some of the light in your eyes you had given to its unlighted windows but you had also fetched some back
from its quays ferries and the stars that lay ignored around its gutters.
From the airport you said it had been too hectic and you were bringing me nothing.
But the moment you alighted forestalling a world you came home so that in you I could roam
the city you had missed me in before the river dried on your tongue and the light could lose in your eyes
a battle with sleep.
Dream
The rain begins impromptu on the roof like a dense flutter of pigeon wings. I am a tenant of this dream tenderly arranging its folds, not mine.
You are always quieter in dreams more prepared to listen. I let your fingers find my tracing paper of skin.
We begin a map we will never complete. The season will always be irregular the passport always be lost
and in between awakenings I always find us in the wrong dream.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Drawn to themes of gender and ecology, her four published books include three collections of poems. A firm believer in the therapeutic power of verse, she writes, reviews, and sporadically curates and translates poetry from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.
Serena Prosperi is a 24 years old Italian writer. She writes poems about her concepts of recovery and spirituality. She is also an actress with a passion for social theatre and a psychiatric rehabilitation student. Recently, she published on the online magazine “They call us” a short story named “Calligraphy”.
even though he asks again “who?” – for clarification? Or because his only reference is what he’s seen on
tv
(this narrow life has no room for maneuver.)
but he doesn’t get it. doesn’t understand
because it’s a woman’s name she says again – it’s a woman who she
His wife
flirted with when autumn came and the leaves began to fall and he was planning bonfires whilst his wife burned up in bed (over, over, over)
legs spread, a woman between her thighs, and
all he can think of to say next is “does it even count?” and “what do you even do in bed anyway?”
because that’s what you say
when your wife comes out gay
but three years on and it’s ok
this picture-book re-written so His wife’s not gay
and christmas comes, and new years eve
and they sign cards all together to prove she didn’t leave.
Coal to Burn the World
I do not belong here.
I, do not belong
Belly down against flat earth I,
Splinter like sheet glass
beneath boots that crack my spine
Do not belong.
I, a feather bed to my own head
My Own, very particular kind of madness
Lying here, on the ground
Life in my teeth, my mouth, my tongue
But still, I breathe
Still not choked after
All these
All these
All of these
Moments.
One, after the other, after the next, after the next
Life. I see it now, stretched too thin with a punctured eye and I see it
How the weeping willow would watch the river bed should I drown
belly up, this time
Eyes like sea glass
Mouth like a fish
Try them all,
Try them all,
These ways to sink a ship, to skin a cat, to catch a mouse
To break a heart
Sink me, rock bottom,
Drown me, slowly,
Take the coins from my mind’s eye and sell my universe for coal to burn the world
Down
But still, I will breathe
Because, I
Do not belong.
Elinora Westfall is an Australian/British lesbian actress and writer of stage, screen, fiction, poetry and radio from the UK. Her novel, Everland has been selected for the Penguin and Random House Write Now 2021 Editorial Programme, and her short films have been selected by Pinewood Studios & Lift-Off Sessions, Cannes Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, Camden Fringe Festival and Edinburgh Fringe Festival, while her theatre shows have been performed in London’s West End and on Broadway, where she won the award for Best Monologue. Elinora is also working on The Art of Almost, a lesbian comedy-drama radio series as well as writing a television drama series and the sequel to her novel, Everland.
Imprisoning their pricelessness to a white supremacy.
The Excavated Skeleton
Won’t they look hurt when voyeurs of time
Pry gold from teeth of fossil whores?
At the lunar Pompeii dig sites,
Miners dig, plunder an earth
Floundering through the weed-scape,
As inevitable years pass by
Your microscope windows
A hurtled arrow from distant reaches
Unkind fate dispatched.
Blackening your pick with fire’s ash
You chip through disenthralled
Alpha-bones disjointed by physics,
Exposing fetor-clogged rib cages
Where morsels of infection hide
To seed the ancient holocausts
Of Ape & Man.
Don’t those jackals salivating
Hunt still your extant flesh
Now, as you excavate the void-fed ruins
Of molting secrets waiting to be found?
The moon’s disquiet strikes you down,
It quakes from your knife disemboweling
All the strange sacrificial skeletons.
Seeking the strata of tethered stars
You see Man moored in elemental dust,
Above which still living alien gods procreate
Another heaven’s fallen universe.
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active for many years in small press circles as writer, artist, poet, and editor of his lit-‘zine ART:MAG. His recent poetry books are The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash), Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net), and Particle Acceleration on Judgement Day (Impspired Press).
And how beautifully our mothers have become their one true mythical woman.
And how beautifully you are becoming your and I, becoming mine.
You drift farther from Persephone’s underworld at dusk;
You grow apart from Eve’s paradise at dawn.
When you crawl back into your shell,
the old, dusty, home-
You find your forbidden fruit,
You take your daily pomegranate seed-
Following the chores of survival
You weave through the necessities and needs.
You are a myth in the mirror,
The woman who planted snails on the back of her hand
The woman who became a parasite of her pets,
Spiralling,
Through the haunting chores,
Dragging the blooming season ’til it blows.
And then,
Slithering deeper into the cold slime to become a point unseen.
Subarnarekha is an artist, researcher and an educator. She loves reading graphic narratives while trying to work on her own. She loves poetry, ancient history, both geography and geology, and Science.
The recent uproar concerning an overwhelming number of school shootings and the United States being the hub of such deplorable crimes isn’t something bizarre. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports 276 casualties at elementary and secondary schools from 2000 to 2021. As astonishing and horrific as it might seem, the process of obtaining a gun is easier than getting a passport or a driver’s license. Ironically, guns are weapons guaranteeing safety and are used by the ones assigned to safeguard constitutional laws. However, the problem does not lie with owning a gun; the problem lies with who and how the guns are handled and/or manipulated.
The geographical distance between the United States and Canada is 2260 kilometers. If we rewind to 1989, we can witness the gruesome École Polytechnique Massacre or the Montreal Massacre on 6th December that unsettled and distorted the whole idea of educational institutions being safe havens. The blood bath claimed the lives of fourteen female students, injuring another ten women and four men. The victims of the ghastly murder were in their 20s, on their last day of the semester, anticipating a relaxed and blissful holiday in the company of family and friends. Little did they know, that their lofty ideas, bold dreams, and invaluable lives were to be cut short in the blink of an eye. The women were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Most of these women were working on developing the STEM course that would eventually alter the course of teaching methods and understanding in the 21st century.
The shooting was a result of insecurity and a misogynistic attitude. Marc Lépine né Gamil Gharbi felt threatened by these meritorious women. So, he cornered them at one side of a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and opened fire with his Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle, killing six women on the spot. Later, he attacked and killed eight more women before fatally shooting himself. He justified his sinister act as a fight against feminism.
Men feeling threatened by women is not an unusual issue. What all the school or college shootings have in common is the loss of innocent lives. The killer instinct always seeks prey or victims who seem vulnerable, and naïve. In most of these mass shootings, children, young adults, or, in this case, the fourteen women, were targeted by the murderer to exert a power play. The tendency to give shape and form to every idea based on masculine parameters has its consequences. This domination over ideas and social constructs gives rise to active maleness which is in an eternal battle to subdue women to render them passive. The green-eyed monster of the Montreal massacre lost sight of his own purpose and felt threatened by these fourteen women who were “more slippery, more fluid, less fixed and more playful than man.” (Cixous) To him “man must write man.” (Cixous) The fluidity and flexibility of these women make the binary oppositions of man/woman, Self/other, and active/passive fall apart. Subsequently, the collapse of this power structure leads to the fall of the symbolic and social order. The position of women in the Symbolic is founded on lack – the lack of a penis/phallus which prohibits them from identifying themselves with the center, thus, disallowing them from taking the position of the center or the subject. However, women often ‘escape discourse’ with the help of tools, such as ‘pen(s)’ or language. Thus, the metaphorical penis i.e. the pen, assumes a mightier position. Moreover, when women become active subjects their language and actions become incoherent and contradictory to patriarchal ideologies because “…there is no pure feminist or female space from which we can speak. All ideas, including the feminist ones, are in this sense ‘contaminated’ by patriarchal ideology.” (Moi)
So, he took the gun and the hunting knife in his hands in an attempt to resist or end feminism. This anti-feminist stance of his is often attributed to the regressive mentality of his father and his disturbed childhood. Barnhorst A. (2018) cited that mass shooters “are driven by a need to wield their power over another group…It’s not an altered perception of reality that drives them; it’s entitlement, insecurity, and hatred.” Thus, being a typical adherent of patriarchal ideologies, Lépine was provoked to kill these women and assert as well as reinstate his (or his race’s) dominance.
Unfortunately, the bullets of the monstrous anger of a gun pierced through the mortal bodies of these fourteen women, murdering every unborn dream and every idea in their nascent stage. But even after all these years, their significant contribution to the world of academia is still venerated, and their reputation remains unassailable. They were women phenomenally. Phenomenal women.
Cixous, H. (1975). “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (1976)
Moi, T. (1989). “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, Wiley–Blackwell, 2nd Edition (1997).
Adrija Basu is currently juggling her work as an IT professional and her passion for research. Besides weaving words, she enjoys weaving vibrant patterns on clothes. She also finds inspiration from the little joys of life, which are often imitated in her paintings and sketches.
Plato's Caves online 