Category: Art + Poetry

By Anushka Joshi | February 21, 2020 My name is Anushka Joshi and I am from Ahmedabad, India, a city where there was a pogrom in 2002 that led to the deaths of nearly two thousand people ((India: A Decade On, Gujarat Justice Incomplete." Human Rights Watch. April 17, 2015). The legacy of this is pervasive today: housing … Continue reading Mother Tongue and Other Poems

 By Anuskha Joshi | May 2, 2019 Scott and Zelda once spent an hour In the revolving door of a hotel- Just another jazz age prank. Like jumping into the fountain at Union Square. Later the accusations The sanatoriums The burning to death  And the death by drowning  In endless glasses That reflected too well.  For now the mouth of misery  Was still muzzled.  Can you imagine them Turning and turning … Continue reading The Marriage

By Anushka Joshi | Illustration by Manya Tam | May 2, 2019 On Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Assia Wevill. They both died domestic deaths, The homewrecker and the housewife. Both with their heads on the cool Grate of an oven. A fuck you to the fifties, That era of aprons like straitjackets, Aprons that … Continue reading The Two Kinds of Women in The World

By Anushka Joshi | Illustration by Manya Tam | May 2, 2019 Yes we all know the story Of the hero Perseus who Decapitated the monster Medusa, She of the hair like snakes, she Whose one look turned people into stone,   That one.  But did you know the preface To that story? How Medusa was raped By the sea … Continue reading The Stare

Concept by Anushka Joshi | Illustration by Manya Tam | December 4, 2018 "Sir, a Washington Post journalist has gone missing after visiting the Saudi Consulate. He's a green card holder, his name is Jamal--" "What's the next report?" "I wasn't done." "You lost me at 'Jamal"

By Anushka Joshi | December 4, 2018 Khulka, Who Had Been to School Inspired by the story of one of the Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS. After all the men, and elderly And children had been taken away Somewhere, The women from the mountains Were taken to Raqqa, delivered In ice cream trucks to prisons. … Continue reading Poems of Conflict