All posts tagged: Issue 4

Escapement

By SUNETRA GUPTA

Selkirk had never owned a wristwatch. It had never seemed 
necessary to be in possession of one. What time it was had never been of any consequence to him in any part of his life. There was his childhood in Calcutta when time seemed lozenge-like, lickable—those long afternoons of lying still in shaded rooms, and then afternoon tea on the veranda with his mother, tapping out with her long nails the anguish of her most recent rebuff at one of the clubs on account of her lowly origins—and then, mercifully, his father, returning from a long day at work, the gentle grey-haired man who had rashly married this chorus girl in the throes of middle age, his father, still loyally serving the company he had joined as a young man in pre-Independence times and trying to make as good a life as possible for them all. When he unexpectedly keeled over, just a few months before he was due to retire, she did not hesitate to return to her old life, and Selkirk was promptly despatched to the boarding school that his father had attended, where time—to return to our original subject—was dispensed in quantities he could neither measure nor understand.

Escapement
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Thank You Lee Smolin, Thank you Mr. Leibniz

By KAREN PRESS

 

So we’re monads after all,
 that’s a relief, complete and separate
and also connected to every other agglomeration of fundamental particles
(aka pine cone, parking meter, vodka orange)
we’ve ever touched however tangentially,
boson from a breath of Plato’s used air
gone two millennia later into the feather of a chicken in Mumbai,
air I exhale full of fermions from the fourth king of Axum’s coronation dinner,
so that if you read any electron’s palm now you can tell
what it will be feeling in 4005.

Thank You Lee Smolin, Thank you Mr. Leibniz
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Allahabad

By ARI SITAS

from Around the World in Eighty Days: The India Section

 

It was important to have a conversation with
Pandit Nehru in Allahabad
After the visitors left the fine house
We sat down for tea
Overlooking the confluence of the sacred rivers
I marveled at the variety of trees

Allahabad
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