Poems—Parthosarothy K. Mukherji

Parthosarothy K Mukherji is an Indian scientist, writer, and innovator whose literary and scientific work spans fiction, poetry, theoretical physics, and medical innovation. He has been an invited member of the Atascadero and Pune Writers Groups and has written acclaimed stories and poems that explore the intersections of identity, loss, and imagination. His work combines emotional depth with sharp observational humor, often inspired by his diverse experiences across health care, engineering, and literature. His previous fiction and poetry have been submitted to leading magazines including Rattle, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons.

Instagram Poems

Poetry nowadays is so goddamn pretty—

Like an Instagram snap: soft-lit, gilt-framed,

Curated down to the sea foam and skyline,

Nothing that jars, nothing unnamed.

The hues? Pastel.

The views? Ethereal.

Everything airbrushed, misty,

Like a Hallmark card read at a funeral.

The sea is painted in luminous ink,

Blue as truth, deep as thought—

But no mention of the sting in the stink,

Of the muck that the tide actually brought.

Not one bare buttock in their lines,

No human squatting on jagged stones,

No swarms of pi-dogs in cannibal circles,

Gnawing fish heads, crunching bones.

They skip the plastic bags,

The half-dead crabs,

The syringes, condoms, diesel froth—

All that’s real is deemed an eyesore,

So they wash it off.

The sea, they say, is metaphor,

A mirror of the soul, a cosmic dream.

But down here, it’s just

A giant goddamned latrine.

Yet that's how poets have always sung—

With rose-tinted quills and eyes half-shut,

Romancing rot as lyrical foam,

Never mentioning the actual gut.

Like Venice, praised in lilting verse

By those who never stayed past dusk—

A fairy tale of domes and gondolas,

Not the stench of piss and rotting muck.

Ask the locals, they’ll tell you true:

When the wind turns, the poetry turns too.

But that scent never made it to stanzas—

Too raw for workshops, too real for view.

“Ami Sagari Jaan” 

(We Know the Sea) 

A Koli Fisher woman speaks of the sea

The city calls it beautiful—

That stretch of blue in their window frames.

To me, it's the belly of a moody god

Who feeds us fish when pleased

And drowns us when not.

At dawn, I tie my sari tight,

Plait my hair with oil and hope.

My fingers smell of dry shrimp

Before the nets are even thrown.

The sea is not a poem.

It is brine and gut and scream.

It is my son's foot gashed by coral,

My husband's back broken on a slippery deck,

My sister swallowed one monsoon,

Returned as a bloated shame.

The sand burns.

The fish rot.

The tourists come, holding cones of ice cream,

Pointing cameras at us

As if we were quaint.

Do they smell the blood on our boats?

Do they see how the gulls fight like drunkards

Over entrails and eyes?

They write verses about sunsets—

I carry buckets of yesterday's bait.

I have prayed to the sea in a thousand ways—

With coconuts, coins,

With songs that only the wind remembers.

Sometimes she listens.

Mostly, she doesn’t.

But I return, every tide,

Because the sea is our fate,

And fate doesn’t wear perfume.

It smells of salt, sweat,

And survival.