In My Cave

By Navneet Bhullar

“ If at least the dress were longer and—— the poems appeared dressed in their Sunday best from head to toe with bells on.”   -Wislawa Szymborska

Our Lila in finery and lipstick reads on zoom from a sofa with square corners    orange splash of art behind her    she inflects      she sighs whilst toppling words out like firecrackers.

Wislawa reads her poem by candlelight     apologetic she did not fly into the room.

Laczeh is deaf. He writes each poem double by translating into ASL* gloss .He does ASL in advance so he does not lose eye contact with his audience in looking down at notes.

David White reads his poems from memory not looking down at all.

I write poems in my cave, hoarded love in folders, pebbled cairns walking me to readings with better poets in the new world. Poems from my cave read aloud with a chunni girdling my bowed neck  in the dark morning. Poems from my cave in the hostile climes of the Punjab where it is a wonder          there are poets.

 *American Sign Language

Navneet Bhullar is a physician, climate activist and writer who has lived between central Pennsylvania and Indian Punjab via central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa , and south-east Asia in her work as a doctor with an international NGO. Her poems and essays have been published in Cagibi, Otherwise magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Harvard Primary Care Review, Peregrine and elsewhere. She has founded a disability NGO in India and is currently at work on her memoir in essays on caregiving.