Monica Mody

Monica Mody's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Little Magazine, Nthposition, Midway Journal, Kritya: A Journal of Poetry, Sheher: Urban Poetry by Indian Women, and Women. Period., among others. Through 2007-2008, she curated a multilingual poetry in performance series in Delhi called Open Baithak. She attended the 2007 Summer Writing Program at Naropa University as a Zora Neale Hurston Scholar, and was awarded the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing in 2006.

Mody holds a law degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and though she did not ever practice, she engaged actively with the human rights and feminist queer movements in Delhi as part of and outside her work with the international human rights organization Breakthrough. She has worked as a freelance editor and writer, and currently attends the University of Notre Dame's M.F.A. Creative Writing Program as a poetry fellow.

Capacity

Sometimes time is born tightly coiled.

Sometimes it falls on you like shavings of light.

Sometimes every turn stops dead – and there

We sit like mad poets flinging dried talk

in the air.

We are alone and lighted only by the flame inside us.

When we lie down, grasses grow from us.

In this poem of mustard and breeze, I can hide

My face in his shoulder always as he sleeps.

Almonds are found in maple fruit and Quitratue,

Like Peking, is just a name, the outpost of

another poem.

Tongueless like tears we rest against each other.

Wilful, knowing we have other faces.