Writer’s Note

I came to contemporary poetry in later age, though I used to scribble in an amused way in early years. Prose poetry came late to me. My second book Photonic Postcard is a collection of prose poems, the book is divided in three parts. The first part has twelve poems, ekphrastic prose poems based on Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. My prose poems tend to heavily rely on the dream imageriers, sometimes drawn from the mundane life’s objects. lines drop in hypnagogic state, and i make them in a box shape, free verse or sometimes in a paragraph with serrated margin, white spaces trickle in. I have edited two Arc prose poetry anthologies, two successive years in the past. There are so many established and newer prose poets published in Arc. Nowadays my other writing projects, beside my medic profession have engrossed me so much that I am not sure I could publish an anthology in 2023, or not. Though it is near to my heart, I would like to publish prose poems on Arc Magazine's blog as much as possible. My prose poem Caged Cat was recited in the Canberra University Festival, Australia, the poem is not in a compact box, the white spaces have taken its proportion in the full measure.

Caged Cat

I tried to call up the mangled mass coagulating in the dark.

The shifting signs tucked in the scorching sun are destiny, they have been steaming out of the helium hearth for hundred years.

And the thought of my end is, in the beginning, makes me sit on the parapet, while the tiny toe is thrashed beneath the tin container of grain.

My mother and women were--creatures of the world, in a circle winnowing the wheat grain in bamboo soop.

I still tried to drag out the toe in a sulking screech but the mangled one held me.

Rotten relics were not in the cubes of Picasso.

I know also my murky mangled is fresher than God’s brushstroke.

The cat caged

in the cobweb,

in the no moon’s night

have been yelling the whole winter.

Dr Pragya Suman

Doctor/editor Arc Magazine/ Writer of Lost Mother and Photonic Postcard.