ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Aekta K. is a writer and educator from Bombay, who associates herself closely to water. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, a safe and inclusive platform, where she conducts month-long generative creative writing workshops. Aekta's book with the working title, A Glass of Blue, was a finalist for the Rising Writer Prize in Poetry 2024 by Autumn House Press. She is the winner of Breakout Prize 2022 in Poetry, and The Baltimore Review's Winter Contest in Poetry. She's a finalist for Indiana Review's Poetry Prize 2022, her work is nominated for Pushcart Prize by Epiphany, Best of Net by Nurture Literary, Best Microfiction by Passages North, and elsewhere. She's been long listed for TOTO awards by TFA three times. Her film, New Normal whose script she has written, won the Best Microfilm award at Indie Short Fest by Los Angeles International Film Festival among numerous others. She has works published in Penn Review, Variant Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Speculative Nonfiction, VIDA, Jaggery, Kitaab Singapore, Muse India, Variant Lit, The Offing, The Inquisitive Eater, Quail Bell Magazine, The Bombay Literary Review, and elsewhere.
September 17, 2025
A Sky of Scattered Stars
There is no good day to grieve
your friend stays in his car
to be closer to the ICU
with his father cloaked in cancer
opens the postbox of memory
you stay in my arms and miss
his phone call because the sound
of death is too loud
seabirds flap through a sky
to look for fish or joy in car parks
you sit with a log on your lap
and smoke till you melt grey
blue purple black nothing
mends a swollen heart
I take a cold shower and feel warm
tears trickling down my cheek
you left me four years ago
there isn’t a thing you can do
but relive the moment and smash
a cockroach with a slipper
you walked through your childhood
with a fallen sky and scattered stars
that you threw as if they were stones
when you returned home your pockets
soggy with blood because grief
is the soft bird you kept
you met me when you were a person
of anger and easy apologies
you beat up someone at the basketball court
and bring them water say sorry sorry I’m
sorry you had a punctured heart
so I lent you mine we both lost
ourselves at a young age
and built a heap of feathers to rest
last week we ate from the same plate
you smoked a cigarette while hugging
my knee because familiarity kept us
together I spend Sunday separating
one cloud from the other
This poem, "A Sky of Scattered Stars" is anchored in the structure of run over lines, bite-sized tercets, and quickly moving visuals, which gives every line a new and/or larger meaning than if read individually; like a watercolor painting. In the fifth draft I cracked this open with no punctuation and intentionally placed exterior elements with the interior so as to widen the universe of the poem. The poem intends to address separation of many kinds — death, almost death (cancer), slow death (smoking), and endless expanse of grief and anger, where the mind is indefinitely separated from the heart in that one moment. The end though, for me personally, is meditative — "separating / one cloud from the other", gave me a sense of calm and quiet, almost like the narrator returns to the nothingness (or is-ness) of life. I wish that the reader feels this at a reasonable level.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
