In The Winter of My Twenty Third Year Being Alive
I got new glasses.
Applied ointment on my face every night,
tried to shower every day, and went down on my knees
and prayed to God.
In the meantime,
the sky is bludgeoning,
my shade leaking out of windows, textbooks and clothes
that have outgrown me.
This morning, I finger comb my hair,
turn the page on Lispector,
look at myself in the mirror on the metro station
and pick up the camera.
There are so many times in my life
I thought it was over —
times when I was so impossibly young that
it shouldn’t even have been a thought.
I think about the pendulum of my age,
the chimera of desire,
my preoccupation with destiny,
movement of the stars and
the ambition that I mistook for a noose.
In the sharpness of dawn,
the rain is gentle on my back
the silo of light, breaking even, too familiar.
I am. I am. I am.*
*Last line is from Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar.
Appears in —
This issue is a curation of poems written by the participants of Ayaskala’s Poetry Writing Retreat held in March, 2025.
Self Portrait —
Created during the retreat, this A5 self-portrait is a visual echo of the poet’s inner landscape.
Paridhi Puri
Paridhi Puri hails from Delhi. She was a SUSI scholar at Between the Lines: University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She is the co-founder of Delhi Reads, a community venture that hosts discussions about literature and culture. Here is her favorite poem of all time.
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