Domatophobia

Samyak Shertok

All day we sit in the field by the lotus monastery and wait,

my niece says through the static. Sometimes they take so long

you forget why you are not inside your house.

Alone, the ground shakes all the time,

so you sit close by someone, even in the bathroom.

Some kids haven’t eaten in days

from the fear of having to go to the restroom.

But walking, you hardly feel them.

So my niece goes from one end of the field

to the other, and then back until she cannot tell

whether the earth is shaking, or her body.

A German Shepherd that was on the third floor

when the second quake struck, my niece says,

has refused to go back into the house ever since.

The man offered him goat curry, the dog’s favourite.

At nightfall, he tried dragging him up with the leash,

but the dog wouldn’t climb those stairs.

In the morning, when the man came down

with the dog’s breakfast, he was gone.

The man and the dog lived alone.

Two days later when he heard that his dog

had been seen amongst the strays by the dumpster,

he grabbed a leash and went after him.

He called himby name.

The dog looked at him for a good minute,

then went back to eating the garbage.

When the man reached for the collar that was still in place,

the dog bared his teeth and barked.

The man dropped to the ground.

A small crowd had gathered around him.

The earth is dancing again! The earth is dancing again!

A deranged woman twirled and twirled, the dust

writhing about her feet. Some of the onlookers laughed.

The man stood up and hawked. Then dragging

the empty leash behind him, he walked into his house.

Seance

Prateebha Tuladhar

Every now and then,

the fault lines below us would shift.

We moved apart when they slid away

and came together when they fell back in place.

We stood over fissures,

staggering/ as our feet

balanced over fragmented spaces.

We navigated the debris

picking up what used to be

you and me.

But some things had moved

permanently

that season of disaster.

Our souls,

Your soul sought light elsewhere

to make it through the calamity;

mine pooled in blue, becoming a hyperbole of darkness.

Perhaps my darkness rubbed on you.

And all we could salvage

of us

were shattered dreams

and promises reflected in shambles.

You had become a festering wound.

I, your torment.

We slipped and slipped and slipped away

until we didn’t need for the fault lines to crack again

to swallow us apart.

We had come undone

of our own erosion,

morphing into bits that would

continue crumbling

because

 love sometimes isn’t enough.

Because

love

sometimes uses hurt

for cover.

Friends and fault lines

Joseph McGerr

Electric echoes whisper to me.

Soft reverberations fall blindly,

deafly on this body.

These eyes may see, but they are blind;

blind until the cables reach the mind.

Tremors tear through the heart.

Shockwaves drown out that

steady beat.

So many things you wish you said, but were too busy, too drunk, too stoned.

Recalling phone calls late at night from friends... about friends.

Is it any better not knowing?

Are we all dead until proven living?

The boulders that roll down from the world’s peak hop across this blue dot.

Screams and rubble blot out the birds, their song and sky.

If only we had wings to match these fragile bones.

Such sorry apes to have left our

living trees to live in their skeletons on the shifting sands.

And here I sit, in my shack on the ring of fire, waiting for Mount Mazama to throw off another rocky shell and cover the sky in ash... A flick of the fingers and the ash falls from a cigarette, and I am back where the cold winter nights pass by huddled ‘round an ember on a front porch.

Words from a foreign land pervade the air here.

Like a first reading of Coleridge, Keats, or Blake, my soul feels what my mind cannot comprehend, and I stand there with my brothers and a belly full of momos, feeling as though I had just descended the tower of Babble, shoulder to shoulder and a world apart.

That time disappears like our warm breath on the cold breeze.

I sit here staring at the news.

Nataraja dances before my eyes and I mutter the only words I know, “maile bhujhina.”

Words

Rajan Shrestha

Translated into English

by Prasiit Sthapit

The earth below this cover

does not stop swaying.

This tired body full of fear

knows not a good night’s sleep.

My mother sleeps on the ground floor,

 terrorised.

 Along with a mattress and a television set

fear has also shifted downstairs.

The NEWS, today,

(on the same television)

of mothers with no ground to tread on.

Sons,

daughters, and

husbands

now only exist in photographs

etched in memory.

Thank god,

westill have a ground floor.

The obligatory post-earthquake poem

Nasala Chitrakar

Post-earthquake,

I drift through my city,

Like fragments of a memory,

Here now and gone the next,

The remains devastate more than the ruins.

With the recklessness of someone who does not

remember being touched by death,

I wait in front of a house, half-down,

like somebody has baked a birthday cake,

and put a knife through its centre, straight.

It looks like a theatre, set

for the actors to walk down the wooden stairs,

but the story has been abruptly interrupted.

the props now narrate

from their spots, immaculate,

cupboard and showcase,

mirror and photo frame,

against  the freshly painted bright green walls.

A sense of loss crawls,

and tears its way home into my insides like the devil’s snare,

as I find my way home to a memory abode,

my ancestral home.

I sit on a ledge across the road,

leaning into the sturdiest of my rocks,

silent but warm,

vigilant through my internal storm.

Save for the slightly tilted door, the facade does

not inform

of the cracks within.

So, from our perch,

I search

for memories and let my mind lurch

from one room to the other and tell him:

“That was my grandmother’s room,

And before I learned to enjoy being a nobody in a crowd, I used to watch the crowd from that window.

My favourite place in the whole house must be the wide open lobby in the second floor.”

But I can not give him the full tour.

There are parts of this house that haven’t

been the same.

Unhinged, I settle for watching the pigeons.

They used to oscillate between the temple to the right and the left.

Today, as if pulled by the gravity of their muscle memory,

their minds play tricks

and they hover against the azure sky,

over the neatly stacked piles of bricks

and a mountain of age-old wood,

all that remains of the temple to the right.

And the loss is felt, mid-flight.

And from a height, instead of an old settlement, I still see rubble,

The trouble is,

Like an incompetent magician,

I try to conjure up images of what it used to look like,

Shuffle and sift through shadowy impressions of negatives,

adrift in a gust of powder dust.

There has been an irksome error in the system:

colours lost from the spectrum.

images accidentally deleted from my hard-drive,

While inside this hollow heart, the loss finds space to thrive.

A few weeks in,

The detritus has been removed from our favourite hang-out,

the square that lured the old and young alike, for bouts

of people-watching, ice-cream-licking, and shade-seeking,

of temple-going, tea-sipping, and sun-bathing.

Today, the square is abandoned, clean.

We sneak in,

Hop across the red ribbon,

have the place all to ourselves: a dream come true.

Only, like a kid who has lost the toy of her dreams at the cost of her parents’ empty bellies,

The stay is uncomfortable,

The quiet, punctuated only by the throaty cooing of the pigeons, cloaks heavy.

The loss echoes amidst silences and soundbites.

Resilience has become the new in-word,

the hot-potato everyone is passing around.

What are Nepali people?

Resilient.

What are Nepali people?

Resilient

Like the earthquake has shook and opened the cap to an aerated drink

And resilience is the fuzz that riots out, effervescent, turbulent.

But no, we have been resilient for a very long time, against mountains of absurdities, opulent!

Surrounded by all this elasticity, ductility and malleability,

I long,

I long for a time when,

despite this loss,

the resilience is not relevant.

April 26th, 2015

Emily Weitzman

What are you waiting for?

at first it was:

for the bus, for love, for dinner

until the answer became:

for the ground to stop shaking.

Everywhere the earth is beneath you.

How it rumbles

with regret or desire

yearning for

a nameless thing.

The day fills with a particular kind of quiet

when you no longer trust the mountains.

The moment when we first laughed again

I had forgotten what it felt like

our joy, how it could seep through the sadness

and fill thesilence of our bodies

for a moment.

How to walk the world again

knowing the way the earth could betray you.  

The portrait of my abode

Samip Dhungel

The colossal weight of my

possessions

sits on the floor and looks at my

feeble bones

My timber my stones

My family my home

sits on the floor and looks at my

feeble bones

The number of my beasts, at least

even numbers reduced to odds

My bed My rug

even a couple of my gods

sit on the floor and look at my feeble bones.