Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, FRiGG, The Chakkar, and elsewhere. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.
kissing with the news on mute
the apartment smells like garlic & rain.
we eat pasta off chipped plates
while gaza buries its children beneath the rubble.
you kiss me like there’s no ash in the air
and the water running through our pipes
didn’t skip someone else’s throat to get here.
you say: stay.
& i do, because the world is too loud
we turn the tv on, just for the light.
the anchor's mouth moves, silent.
i think about a girl with red barrettes,
found under concrete. i think about
the mother who washed her with bottled water.
i think of my own mother, folding towels
while the country she left burns slower
than the one she fled.
(sometimes survival is shame
that learned how to walk upright.)
my shower runs hot.
i cry into the tile & say, it’s cleansing.
i scroll past headlines, donate five dollars,
feel righteous, then kiss you again.
my body forgets how to hold grief
so it folds into yours.
(what language do we use
for pleasure that costs someone else’s breath?
outside, the rain keeps falling.
somewhere, a city turns off its sirens.
you whisper my name like a prayer
and i want to believe it’s enough.
i want to believe loving you
isn’t the most selfish thing i’ve done today.
(but the water runs hot
and the sky, for now, is whole)
god works in immigration
denied my mother’s visa three times—
each refusal a prayer unanswered.
i watch the clock punch holes in our grief,
stamped with expiration dates,
the smell of waiting rooms stale as old promises.
(he never learned how to say my name.)
god sits behind a desk cluttered with files,
his hands folding paper dreams into ash.
my father’s papers lost somewhere between
midnight and the next form,
i lost faith the day they lost his identity.
(there’s no heaven here
just endless lines and locked doors)
i call god by the wrong name,
curse him in the language he forgot.
my mother folds towels with hands trembling—
each crease a silent protest
against a god who trades in red stamps, not mercy.
the walls listen but do not answer.
outside, the city breathes without us.
i fold my grief into a suitcase,
tuck my name inside like a secret,
hoping god forgets how to open it.
diaspora is a scam
my aunt says it over bitter tea—
how they sold us dreams wrapped in passports,
promises folded like cheap paper planes,
crashing somewhere between here and nowhere.
they told us it was freedom,
but freedom never comes with baggage fees
i learned to speak two languages that don’t quite fit,
my tongue a clumsy translation of home and exile.
my mother’s cooking tastes like memory and loss,
the same dishes nobody knows how to name anymore.
(we are strangers in maps we didn’t draw)
every flight ticket is a wager on belonging,
but the currency is too high—
a lifetime of waiting rooms,
missed birthdays,
empty chairs at tables still warm with absence.
diaspora is a scam
sold by those who never had to leave
my father’s laugh is thinner now,
stretched between two countries,
one that forgot him,
the other that never fully claimed him.
and i—
caught in the middle—
wonder if home was ever real
i hold my heart like a visa application—
folded, stamped,
always pending.
