Featured Writer Paresh Tiwari
Bite-sized Bullets
The bed belches and spits out a bone. The excavators claim it is sixteen billion years old. It comes from your body before they start you on a steady diet of silence.
A fistful every meal.
And when you refuse. They pour white-hot-liquid-silence down your nose. Into the empty belly of dissent. Over the unkempt hair. Over a mirror that gathers dust. Over the picture of a mother who once birthed ten children. All dead.
Bleached-bones is the colour of shrouds. All sixteen billion years old.
In the room, the only chair mates with newspapers. A curtain blots out the sky. The table hops by on a single leg. And you sharpen your teeth over the rusting bars of this prison.
alone
a Sangai haggles
the cost of peace
About the author:
Paresh Tiwari is a writer, poet, and a cartoonist in the body of a Naval Officer. He has been widely published, especially in the sub-genre of Japanese poetry. The first collection of his haiku and haibun, An Inch of Sky, was published in 2014. Currently the resident cartoonist for Cattails, a journal by United Haiku and Tanka Society, USA, he was also commissioned for thirty-five illustrations for the December 16 edition of Frameless Sky. Tiwari has been invited to read his works at various literature festivals, including the Goa Art and Lit Fest – 2016, and has conducted haiku and haibun workshops at Hyderabad International Literature Festival – 2014, SIES College Mumbai and British Council Library, Mumbai. His second book of haibun, titled Raindrops Chasing Raindrops is in the bookstores now. Tiwari is the O:JA&L featured writer for March 2020.
Image: Transparent by Rajasekharan Parameswaran (1963- ). Oil on canvas. 36 x 24 inches. No completion date specified. By free license.
