Saturday, March 14, 2015
Nourishment: 802 Days
802 days, 120,000 words, 400 pages
802 breakfasts, dinners, lunches packed or plated
1604 snacks, school days stacked on soccer fields
My teeth brushed 1604+ times, theirs too
Sex, crunches, bike 70 miles a week
Days of tears less than a dozen
Moments of joy almost every day
0 full nights of sleep
The writing life is the nourishing life
Sunday, February 22, 2015
BPJ tweets: Congrats to our Pushcart nominees
BPJ tweets: Congrats to our Pushcart nominees, @LeeyaMehta, Matt Salyer,
@Danez_Smif, Mathew Kelsey, Ashley Davidson, and Brian Komei Dempster.
See the poem The Abduction here: http://www.bpj.org/poems/mehta_abduction.pdf
See the accompanying essay on the BPJ blog and comments here: http://blog.bpj.org/2014/05/leeya-mehta-on-abduction.html
The poem recording: http://www.bpj.org/poems/mehta_abduction.mp3
Note that some of these links are no longer live as the BPJ web site has changed.
See the poem The Abduction here: http://www.bpj.org/poems/mehta_abduction.pdf
See the accompanying essay on the BPJ blog and comments here: http://blog.bpj.org/2014/05/leeya-mehta-on-abduction.html
The poem recording: http://www.bpj.org/poems/mehta_abduction.mp3
Note that some of these links are no longer live as the BPJ web site has changed.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
New Poem: Metal Anniversary
Metal Anniversary appears in the new edition of Beltway Poetry Quarterly:
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/metal-anniversary/
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/metal-anniversary/
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Interview: Finding Balance through Poetry and Prose
See an interview by Lisa O’Donoghue-Lindy on Career2.0blog.net
Leeya Mehta: Finding Balance through Poetry and Prose
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Locusts
No one knows what the locusts
pray at night
before they storm
the church yards.
Whose number do they
dial, what last minute
lovers do they take?before they storm
the church yards.
Whose number do they
dial, what last minute
No one knows
why they
block out the sun sometimes
rather than the moon.
She used to think
That to know these things,
One had to be a locust.
Now she is not sure
If the locusts know anything.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Eating Great-Grandfather
First published in Fulcrum, Number 3
Dull green paint over wood
Enveloping
Cold lead.
Obstinate — its use diminished —
Its writing faded even as it is driven on the page.
A broad pencil
Recycled from dead Bejanji Pappa’s
Stationary coffers, I hope,
And gnaw the bitter flaking end.
Some remnants of spit from him
Dance on my tongue
But he was very proper and wouldn’t chew like me — a
Monkey girl -
Perched on the refrigerator
So that thousands of miles away I can get an aerial view of Berlin as my
Great-grandfather did
In black and white like his photographs:
By then economics had given back the colour to
Hitler’s youth. I count, on my abnormally long seven-year-old fingers,
How much my pink and white
Phantom candy cigarettes would cost in the Berlin of 1924. More than my Lego blocks.
My Great-grandfather was blind before he died
And I close my eyes and walk around the house barefoot
Imagining what it felt like to have blood
Circulating, throbbing in my eyes and not seeing, like I
Miss the dead I never met.
As if by holding pencils they once used I could touch them
But don’t I know the lead is stoic, like my Grandfather, and the ashes, my skeleton too.
A kucha black granite slab was polished to sit on Bejanji Pappa’s remains
And my Grandfather’s ribs are under my fingers constantly from the forty minutes I tried to push
My life force back into his warm, helpless body
But he was dead, too late for CPR. His Pappa and he, they left me.
And now I go about taking large gulps of air to remind me
They once lived and breathed this air I breathe in now -
Oxygen that traced their bronchi
Now fleets past mine.
Maybe my cells’ ancestral molecules are dusted onto an old suit worn on the ship, maybe
My children shall eat red desi carrots grown on the Belgaum soil —
Decomposed Great-grandfather, Bejanji Pappa.
First published in Fulcrum, Number 3, 2004
http://fulcrumpoetry.com/issues/3/index.html
Dull green paint over wood
Enveloping
Cold lead.
Obstinate — its use diminished —
Its writing faded even as it is driven on the page.
A broad pencil
Recycled from dead Bejanji Pappa’s
Stationary coffers, I hope,
And gnaw the bitter flaking end.
Some remnants of spit from him
Dance on my tongue
But he was very proper and wouldn’t chew like me — a
Monkey girl -
Perched on the refrigerator
So that thousands of miles away I can get an aerial view of Berlin as my
Great-grandfather did
In black and white like his photographs:
By then economics had given back the colour to
Hitler’s youth. I count, on my abnormally long seven-year-old fingers,
How much my pink and white
Phantom candy cigarettes would cost in the Berlin of 1924. More than my Lego blocks.
My Great-grandfather was blind before he died
And I close my eyes and walk around the house barefoot
Imagining what it felt like to have blood
Circulating, throbbing in my eyes and not seeing, like I
Miss the dead I never met.
As if by holding pencils they once used I could touch them
But don’t I know the lead is stoic, like my Grandfather, and the ashes, my skeleton too.
A kucha black granite slab was polished to sit on Bejanji Pappa’s remains
And my Grandfather’s ribs are under my fingers constantly from the forty minutes I tried to push
My life force back into his warm, helpless body
But he was dead, too late for CPR. His Pappa and he, they left me.
And now I go about taking large gulps of air to remind me
They once lived and breathed this air I breathe in now -
Oxygen that traced their bronchi
Now fleets past mine.
Maybe my cells’ ancestral molecules are dusted onto an old suit worn on the ship, maybe
My children shall eat red desi carrots grown on the Belgaum soil —
Decomposed Great-grandfather, Bejanji Pappa.
First published in Fulcrum, Number 3, 2004
http://fulcrumpoetry.com/issues/3/index.html
Saturday, July 5, 2014
On God on day 550
Look at the calendar. It is day 550 of writing full time. Jan 1, 2013 until today.
Reading Ted Hughes:
On God
You were like a religious fanatic
Without a god - unable to pray.
You wanted to be a writer.
Wanted to write? What was it within you
Had to tell its tale?
The story that has to be told
Is the writer's God, who calls
Out of sleep, inaudibly: 'Write.'
Write what?
Was at dinner at a writer friend's home yesterday and his 83 year old father said, in Tamil society, when a boy is interviewed as a prospective husband, the girl's family asks, "What do you do?"
If the boy says, "I am a writer," the girl's family says, "Yes, but what do you do for a living?"
The girl is discouraged from marrying the boy.
Reading Ted Hughes:
On God
You were like a religious fanatic
Without a god - unable to pray.
You wanted to be a writer.
Wanted to write? What was it within you
Had to tell its tale?
The story that has to be told
Is the writer's God, who calls
Out of sleep, inaudibly: 'Write.'
Write what?
Was at dinner at a writer friend's home yesterday and his 83 year old father said, in Tamil society, when a boy is interviewed as a prospective husband, the girl's family asks, "What do you do?"
If the boy says, "I am a writer," the girl's family says, "Yes, but what do you do for a living?"
The girl is discouraged from marrying the boy.
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