Yellow Pages

The poet scours ‘old tomes’ looking for opiates and healing potions that will act as a balm for old memories of loss, pain and unrequited love.

Yellow pages trace

Tales of what might have been.

A pressed flower here

A torn bookmark there

Linger on corridors

Of memories and wish

As chronicles of unworded lore.

I stroke their creases

With lightest of touch

And scour my tomes

For potions to heal

The unspoken loops of your loss.

Failing, I float them in air

And ponder what poems they’ll breathe

From Matterhorn’s ridges

To Florentine streets

Through lips that dared not meet.

Abin Chakraborty teaches English literature in Chandernagore College, West Bengal, India. He has been writing for several years and his poems have been published in Indian and International publications such as Café Dissensus, Rupkatha Journal, Muse India, Pine Cone Review, among others. He is also the author of the scholarly monograph, Popular Culture, published by Orient Blackswan (2019). His scholarly articles have also been published in journals and anthologies from India and abroad. His collection of poems Unlettered Longings was published recently. He is the editor of Postcolonial Interventions, an interdisciplinary online journal and one of the co-editors of Plato’s Caves, an online platform that hosts an array of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.