Arachnid
I have a photo of my aunt
dressed like a sweet Kashmiri girl,
clicked years before she passed away.
It’s somewhere in the almirah.
One night it became a spider
and spun pale yellow yarns of web
between my brain and the gate of
the School of Tropical Medicine.
It walked on eight legs sucking on
a cocooned crust of memory,
filling its cephalothorax
with congealed lumps of tenderness.
Then the fat spider sat on a
sticky thread hung from a blue sky,
where a sweet Kashmiri girl flew
into the golden of the setting sun.
Bio
Amit Shankar Saha is a widely-published award-winning poet and short story writer. He has won the Poiesis Award for Excellence in Literature, the Wordweavers Prize, and the Nissim International Runner-up Prize for Poetry. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the co-founder of Rhythm Divine Poets, the Assistant Secretary of Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library and the Fiction Editor of Ethos Literary Journal. His poems have been included in Best Indian Poetry Anthology 2018 and he has read his poems at Sahitya Akademi, Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival and at other literary events. His two collections of poems are titled Balconies of Time and Fugitive Words. He has co-edited a volume of short stories titled Dynami Zois. He has a PhD in English from Calcutta University and teaches in the English Department of Seacom Skills University.
