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On These Streets by Aparna Mitra

October 30, 2023
Reading Time: 1 Minutes
I saw a mob beat a man.
Terror in his streaming eyes mixed with threads
of suspended snot, hands — two small breakable shields
up against his face and the mob pawing,
impatient now. Raw tongue-teeth-maw circle in,
rough hands rip, shirt strips like flayed skin
trail off the thin back and a man dissolves
in animal howls. In this city, nothing moves.
Even the river, that wild muscled thing
flinging itself on rocks, gouging through granite
upstream, has grown thick-waisted here.
Grey is a terminal affliction.
It stains you. Decrepit, you return still
prospecting assurance in shadowless streets,
nostalgia hawked from high-street shops,
sterile in cellophane. The old mills ring
like bells, empty on the water’s edge
where the sullen river drags its feet
and behind green shutters, in darkened houses,
the poets write their dogged verse of betrayal —
bored adultery to defer thoughts of death.
Somewhere in this city (where nothing moves),
a mother longs for her son.
In her smudged mind, he is still ten.
She is calling him home, her voice waving
like a flag, waving through the shuttered lane,
in the high street shops, on the water’s edge,
by the empty mills, the darkened houses,
waving over the poets, the mob, the man,
each syllable an orange tongue
each syllable eating the grey.


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The Weekly

Mitra, Aparna
A Melbourne based poet, Aparna writes in Bengali and in English. Her poetry has twice won the My Brother Jack Awards, was a finalist in the Fish Poetry Prize 2021 and longlisted for Palette Emerging Poets 2022. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2023 for her poem ‘Jam’. Aparna has a masters in business management and has worked in banking and in microfinanace. Her most recent publications were in The Empty House Press, Stirring: A Literary Collection, The Amethyst Review and Psaltery and Lyre. When not writing, you can find her trying to coax temperamental Indian tropical plants to bloom in her suburban Melbourne garden, parenting a couple of high-strung teens and tweeting @aparnamitra0

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