Aekta Khubchandani

Contest - Poetry

Aekta Khubchandani is a writer and poet from Bombay. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, where she conducts month-long poetry workshops. She is enrolled in a dual MFA program in poetry and nonfiction from The New School in New York, where she is the Readings and Community Development Assistant. Her recent poems got long listed for Toto Awards by TFA for the third time! Her fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect,” which won the Pigeon Pages Fiction contest, has been nominated for Best American Short Fiction by Pigeon Pages. Her piece “I’m digging graves for rats” has been nominated for Best Microfiction by Passages North, and her poem “Sun spotting” has been nominated for Best of the Net 2021 by Nurture Literary. Her essay “Holes in the Body,” published by Entropy, was featured on Best of Net by LitHub. Her film “New Normal,” for which she wrote the script, won the Best Microfilm award at Indie Short Fest by the Los Angeles International Film Festival. She has published works in Speculative Nonfiction, Tupelo Quarterly, Jaggery Lit, and elsewhere. She’s working on two hybrid books that smudge prose and poetry.

 

You have stopped going

to grocery stores to listen to the sound of people while you’d wait in the queue. When you lose someone to the open breast of earth, your death inches forward; death is a singular and multiplying component of life. The moment you’re captured as a jpeg you disappear from the living scene to a picturescape. The wind on a whim, whiff of chicory from your coffee, you consume films, hoard books, hang your arms over the bed, the sun lifts the sky up, you draw blinds and dream of a dragonfly getting bigger and closer until you squeeze your eyes like a lemon slice, blacken the visual of the fly with your quilt and wake up. If you miss someone, you send them tomatoes. You look for heirloom varieties: white wonder, brandywine, evergreen, black cherry, marvel stripe hand pruned, all colors of an engulfed sun. A sunset is a recurring death. You visit the graveyard without reason and with tomato stalks when the sun makes thinner lines on the horizon. Isn’t planting stalks and seeds a kind of burial? You think of hill farms and orchards in Brooklyn, a crowded vegetation. You go to parks to listen to people, sitting a bench apart and enjoy looking at a dog eating tulips.

“ It’s a way of life—to be here and alive, and to be dying in poems. The narrator is acutely aware of death and finds it in people sounds at grocery stores, fruits, graveyards, and flowers. Death is like the end of the line, the last punctuation on the page. And grief is an opening, no matter where it opens. This poem bears the weight of both. ”