By Arts & Culture, Poetry June 1, 2013

Ten Feet by Ten Feet

(After a Kabir Sumon song)

Get your lover to take you away, fly oh fly
Get your mother to not have the fourth baby
Get your father to stop drinking out his guts
Get your heart to stop counting skipped beats
Take this ten-feet-by-ten-feet life away.
Ride the office rush hour’s crashing dragon back
Ride sleepless dreams to search for songs, oh so rare
Ride the summer tar fumes stuck to your month-end shoes
Ride away from the sawdust clouds that roam to choke the dew
Take this-ten-feet-by-ten-feet life away

Nabina Das, a 2012 Charles Wallace Fellow, University of Stirling, UK, and a 2012 Sangam House Fiction Fellow, has a poetry collection Into the Migrant City (Writers Workshop, Kolkata; cited one of the best readings of 2015) and a short fiction collection The House of Twining Roses: Stories of the Mapped and the Unmapped (LiFi Publications, Delhi). Published widely nationally and internationally, her debut poetry collection Blue Vessel(Les Editions du Zaporogue, Denmark) was listed as one of best of 2012 and her first novel Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books, Delhi) was longlisted for the Vodafone-Crossword awards 2011. A 2011 Rutgers University MFA, a 2007 Joan Jakobson (Wesleyan University) and a Julio Lobo fiction scholar (Lesley University), and a journalist and mediaperson for about 10 years, Nabina teaches Creative Writing in classrooms and workshops.

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