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"The Mall of Men" & "Extra Marital" by Sanket Mhatre



THE MALL OF MEN


She chooses men the same way

you’d pick a detergent bar or a cereal box at a hyperstore

Carefully; after looking at the expiry date

manufacturing details, ingredients, trademark, et cetera

(At best, we are museum exhibits or broken seats of the last matinee)


Her aching prurience sways under the glib talk of poetry

While she measures our frame on the totem pole of her abstinence

Our libido must equal her void

Our despair must average her thirst for bestial lunacy

Our rough skin must hold the salt of her childhood

Our torsos must resemble dim hotel rooms or borrowed flats

(Because she has stayed in seven stars with her husband)

Our tongues must carry her bittersweet words

So, when we sweat above her

she can taste herself, more


Her trained irises hunger-spot us for signs of buried trauma

That way, we could be cold-pressed for character arcs first

and then smoothly molten into stories

The acid of our triggered abuse could be used for quick exits

Someday,

We could become poems too

So, she can read the in-between of our giving breaths,

in festivals far and near,

like a lost huntress

while tasting our blood,

forever unpublished.



EXTRA MARITAL


We have an extra-marital affair - with time

Standing at the door with bags packed ready to move out

At the slightest hint of infidelity, ignorance or negligence

Time claims everything when it leaves -

The past sharing of rooms, kisses and windows pasted with evening skies

The earth of our souls and quantum of every journey

The stories we kept repeating and the ones we couldn’t tell

It takes too much when it leaves you for someone else

And worse, for nothing but itself

It’s painful to let time depart

So, we write and rewrite our lives

with the desperation of a thousand atoms

Hoping that time understands our honesty

waits for some more time

a day or two

calling it true love




Sanket Mhatre has been featured at Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Jaipur Literature Festival and Glass House Poetry Festival. His first book of cross-translated poems, The Coordinates Of Us won the prestigious Raza Foundation Grant after been shortlisted at IWrite2020 at Jaipur Literature Festival. Sanket’s poems have appeared in multiple anthologies such as Shape Of A Poem, The Well Earned, Home Anthology by Brown Critique, Poetry Conclave Yearbook as well as literary magazines such as Punch, Borderless, Muse India, Madras Courier, The Usawa Literary Review, Men Matters Online, Anthology by Querencia Press and many others.

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