Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us E-Book

Various

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 106

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This omnibus anthology contains the commissioned work from the eighteen excellent queer poets (nine from India and nine for the UK) who have made up the three cohorts of the Language Is A Queer Thing development project from 2022 to 2024 along with a new poem from each of the six poets who then appeared in our celebratory 2025 project. The aim was to create new poetry on the queer experience and the investigate the queering of language to better express that experience. Moving, profound and eye-opening, this omnibus edition brings the poems of all three cohorts together and is the poetic product of our project, with many of the poems in print for the first time. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed helping to make them. Poets include: Sanah Ahsan debut collection, I cannot be good until you say it (Bloomsbury, 2024), Mukahanh Limbu, debut pamphlet, Mother if Flip-flops (Out-Spoken Press 2022), Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, debut novel in verse, Bad Queer forthcoming (Faber 2026). Full List: Sanah Ahsan, Aadrit Banerjee, Hafsa Bukhary, Garfield D'Souza, Ife Grillo, Sara Haque, Megha Harish, Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, Abu Leila, Mukahang Limbu, Jay Mitra, Anil Pradhan, Parth Rahatekar, Amani Saeed, Kirran Shah, Rachit Sharma, Ray VM and Anureet Watta

Leseprobe

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2025 all individual authors

The right of all individuals to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical,

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED SEP 2025

Printed and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-87-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-913917-88-3

Cover illustration by Alafiya Hasan

Cover design by Rachita Sai Barak

CONTENTS

Foreword by Joelle Taylor

Introduction by The Queer Muslim Project

A celebration of temporary seductions and heartbreak - Kirran Shah

We, the Hawkfish - Parth Rahatekar

A True Story - Amani Saeed

Nomenclature - Megha Harish

My ocean body - Rachit Sharma

Ode to a meal deal - Mukahang Limbu

pity party - Sara Haque

—

Sara Haque

10 step nighttime routine for a loner

Humarey beech

Incantation

Parth Rahatekar

the heart remembers

sweet mortality

chimera makes hipster coffee

Aadrit Banerjee

it is at the moment of silence, that my mother’s water broke

after coming home, my mother sticks her bindi on the cracked mirror

things I inherited from my mother: a fish-earring, rage, and fish-thorns that stick in my throat

Ray VM

In which I compare myself to a donut :)

I am life modelling instead of being at the vigil

Untitled

Abu Leila

Improvements on living

The silence is a pot

Alive/Dead

Kirran Shah

Divide/Liberate

The circle with a strikethrough

In the margins

—

Hafsa Bukhary

a song for all my mothers

a knowing

wait for me as I learn to love you

Gayathiri Kamalakanthan

Plunging

Falling in Cassiobury Park

Dear akkā

Mukahang Limbu

Yellow Mother

Good Old Lonely Kingdom

Boy Trauma Sonata

Anureet Watta

Departure

City Planning

Egg Bread

Rachit Sharma

Wikihow for Tango

Postcard

The World Must Die II

Jay Mitra

Delicious Magic Trick

The Essentials

Portrait of Queer Kid As Dandelion

—

Megha Harish

Hatchlings

Subterranea

Milk bikis

Paradise (with Amani Saeed)

Amani Saeed

Ganna

Omen

Riis beach

Sanah Ahsan

kanpur is shrinking in the rearview mirror

cord

shezada

Garfield F. Dsouza

Looking for Shrapnels

2012

Spaces

Anil Prahan

love x home

sex x poetry

brick-by-brick

namesakes (with Ifẹ Grillo)

Ife Grillo

Lágbájá

There are no mangoes in this poem

Polyglot Lover

About the poets and organisers

FOREWORD

It is 2025 and the UK’s LGBT+ safety rating according to ILGA-Europe has dropped to its lowest position since records began. In the last year the UK slipped from 16th to 22nd out of 49 European countries. This is disturbing for obvious reasons, and some LGBT+ organisations cite it as evidence of a suspected co-ordinated global backlash against LGBT+ identities and sexualities. It is into this time and place that this book falls. Somewhere There is a Sky for Us is a collection for the queers, for the ill-fitting revolutionaries, those whose bodies have become contested territories.

It is a shared international language of poetry working toward a collective identity.

Across the world poets and writers share a common queer heritage, taught the same communal and individual shame, legislated against, exiled, unwritten, erased, risking and often losing everything for the sake of love, for the idea of one hand touching another. There is an argument to suggest that all the poems in this volume are love poems; just as they are all political poems. There is little difference for the marginalised queer writer. Every word is a risk, an outing. As such this is a brave book, a small girl shouting back at a tsunami.

The works within explore the complex intersections between race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. They consider the border between bodies, what it means to be dislocated from identity, to search for a mother tongue, to queer language itself.

The result is a poetic that is as curious as it is stunned, a gentle rage that rises from the book. There are experimentations in form, and words thrown at the page as though they were a fistful of butterflies. There is a sense of shared responsibility that watermarks each poem, a commitment to mutual care. The collaborative poems are beautiful in scope and communion, a reaching out that is the essence of our mutual survival.

Though the fight for a white working class British dyke like me differs from that of the BIPOC queer communities, our struggles agree on one point: that we are each a part of a larger queer body.

It is time to remove the safety pins from the back of our throats, to stand together and walk toward the future as one.

This is not just poetry. This is a body.

Joelle Taylor

2025

INTRODUCTION

We are familiar with the power of the word. When spoken, chanted, or uttered with conviction and hope, the word ceases to be latent; it buzzes with life, charged with intention. Spells are chanted and diagrams glow, prayers and dirges ring through halls, and poets generously gift their own words in their voices on stages. The spoken word is a unique tool that transforms audiences and listeners.

When we speak of dandelions floating down both Feroze Shah Road and Rose Street, or of dreams that taste of milk-bikis and mint tea, we are affirming a truth felt in our bones: borders and distances cannot sever our primal connections. Poetry reminds us of our shared tendencies and our collective hope for the world.

As The Queer Muslim Project, we are witness to the transformative potential of literature and community practice. We believe in the potency of words and the magic of collaborative artistic creation. Platforming diverse voices sparks dialogue and creates cohesion in a world fragmented by global challenges — a task that cannot be done in isolation. In that spirit we found a partner and friend in VERVE Poetry. Together we sought to nurture art by those whose stories do not yet inform mainstream cultural discourse: voices from the North of England and the North-East of India, diasporic and migrating, of faiths and beliefs that resist neat categorization.

Why have these artists so rarely been in the spotlight? In conversation with each other and our communities we located a deep void in language itself. If language cannot hold the abundance of human experience, then we can help shift it. We can create conditions for creative exploration beyond borders and beyond words that limit. As a leading arts and culture platform for queer, Muslim, and underserved storytellers in Asia, we have learned something about curating spaces for artists and bringing light to new stories.

An initiative of this scale needs support. We built the scaffolding of this idea with bilateral institutions and festivals — the British Council, BBC Contains Strong Language, Mumbai Lit Live, Jaipur Literature Festival — and with a range of friends, storytellers, and lovers of language who have become core to this movement. With them we affirmed that language can be queered and that non-normative articulations can be translated from Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil and French into new forms. Even when poems are penned in English, they carry sensibilities our heritages have passed down. Language moves from page to stage and around the world.

Language is a Queer Thing. That simple statement became the initiative’s name. If you are reading this, dear reader, you too are part of LIAQT.

Year after year we witnessed new connections and realizations as cohorts of emerging and mid-career poets spoke of origins, of belonging, and of how they wish to move in the world. Since its year of inception in 2022, translators, writers and established poets have mentored each cohort from LIAQT. Beyond technical workshops these exchanges created a sense of belonging: queer, allied, purpose-driven mentors, poets and organisers co-created the programme online and in person, forging friendships that transcended assumptions about group politics and identity. We cheered each other on and showed up for shared visions. Poetry emerged in Venn diagrams, inside footnotes, in Zoom chats, and in drafts written only hours before a showcase. We moved from virtual sessions to intensive residencies — from enchanting conversation in Birmingham’s Hippodrome and the sound of the sea in Mumbai, to strolls past silver trees in Leeds and shared chai at stalls in Kolkata. Our congregations were magical.

A fact about this book you hold is that all the contributors are queer and underrepresented in mainstream cultures. We have approached this expansively by involving poets who view queerness as woven into other aspects of their being — as ancestral and as ordinary, as ancient as seas and goddesses, and as everyday as breakfasts with lovers, doughnuts, mistranslations, and the ache of not being seen by one’s family. The themes and genres reflect the complexity of queer life across India, the United Kingdom, our origins, and our futures. Queerness is not separate from mother tongues, memories of lost homelands, lullabies, or the sky under which we stand.

This omnibus anthology gathers the textures and angles of those experiences. The poems here move between intimate confession and public speech, between lullabies and civic demand, between native languages and the codified forms of English. The imagery is lush: the taste of halwa, the sounds of cities, encounters in the ocean, the stubborn persistence of a wildflower in concrete. The forms range from the spare lyric to performance pieces best read out aloud; some poems carry movement and staging within their lines, others hold translation and multilingual cadences; several compose in the language of the everyday, turning ordinary objects and routines into portals to fantastical worlds. Taken together, the images and forms in this volume show us how queerness, language and memory mingle: ritual and domesticity, exile and home, resistance and tenderness, the political and the private.

This anthology contains works from all four years of the programme alongside fresh poems from 2025; it celebrates how far we have come and looks ahead. In our fourth year, with LIAQT fellows from 2022, 2023 and 2024, we have created a network of eighteen queer poets and countless supporters. Our showcases have reached students, diplomats and audiences who are eager to belong.

A poem, spoken aloud or shared on the page, invites response. Queer poets have braved cultural storms and the risk of unkindness to bare truths for audiences. These poems are intimate. We ask that you hold these tender confessions with care and allow yourself to be changed by them.

Language is a Queer Thing as an initiative has also been built on labor, love, and the truth of our lives. Culture work, art making, trust and friendship power this work beyond logistics and resourcing. One moment that captures how we live our poetic truths and why we care to create art: in Autumn 2023, on our way to Yorkshire Sculpture Park during our LIAQT residency in Leeds, we asked each other whether we believed in the intangible — the continuation of our lives and

stories beyond earthly concerns.

One of us said, humbly, “we’re a pile of atoms.” and we journeyed on.

Upon reaching our destination, we were greeted by an expanse of green hills decorated sparsely by huge sculptures.

So there we were: piles of atoms under the sky.

So small along rolling hills and art that is older than us. We were bundles of energy singing, reflecting on the journey we had shared, soaking light glinting off of metal and water.

We believed that art could change the world in small, sometimes

magnanimous ways. It was a reminder of our place in this world and in the history of language and meaning-making.

We have loved every moment of it and we look forward to continuing this work with you.

Maniza Khalid

The Queer Muslim Project

2025

Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us

A celebration of temporary seductions and heartbreak

Kirran Shah

when you tell me

the moong daal turns to ash in my mouth

rusty iron hardened womb in old oak

you’ve had a SHOCK

being held was an illusion

it pours out ancient lineage and longing.

Wounds seek completion

what the mind cannot hold

seeks a route through the body.

Collapsing can also be release

the soft leaves are kind to my crackling knees

weathered muscle hangs off bone

scrambling to keep up, keep at bay, keep close

get your hands out of your pockets

renewing a cycle of retreating coloniser

Desire is transactional

GIVE yourself to me

not silly bitey withholding Mwah! That’s enough for now, that’s all you’re getting

DIG your elbows IN-to the deep knots in my shoulders, that’s enough, my arms are hurting now