It was time for dance and abandon on the floor
The orange and red lights – pearls dropping loose
from branches of the ceiling.
The stocky, myna bird-eyed anxious DJ
prepares himself for the evening’s dance
He locks his gaze to himself
like a sleeping eye
finding a land in inertness.
He coils his fingers and draws chest inward
Nobody sees him in the crater of darkness
from where the tinny and throbbing music is yet to burst forth.
The dance floor fringed by shy dancers
Waiting for the seasoned to arrive
They will see others dance,
graze the beats inside their bodies
and coil inside, heart thumping
before an expert dancer drags them into the boil of dance.
When they are pressed into dancing
They go and sway their bodies
Fear shooting inside nerves
and flit quickly into the non-dance zone
like an air-emptied balloon –
lying flat, pallid at the corner of the room
waiting for a mouth to blow some air
into the body clothing death.
Born and raised in Kolkata (India) and partially nurtured in Delhi (India), Pushpanjana Karmakar Biswas has contributed poems and fiction to magazines in the likes of Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi’s bi-monthly journal), Poetry India: Enchanting Echoes (All India Poetry Competition), The Sunflower Collective, Indian Review and The Bombay Review. She currently resides in Bangalore and works as a corporate lawyer. She continues to be a part of a poetry group Moonweavers in Delhi. She likes to read works by Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Dom Moraes, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She examines laughter and the lack of it.