Author: Mahvash K. M.

I consider myself somewhat of a serial corporate rut absconder because a sabbatical that was to last a year, has turned to eight, and I still see no end in sight. Before that, I worked in the Financial Services Industry. When I’m not writing, I’m fussing in my head, over ideologies of social justice and equality, with superhero twists! My stories and poems have appeared in The Rumen, Sequoia Speaks, Recesses, Every Day Fiction, Blaze Vox and Double Speak magazines. My poem, “Veins” was long listed in the Plough 2023 poetry competition. Books: The Girl with the Paisley Dupatta - (short stories) Shimmering Scraps of Poetry and Madness - (Poetry and essays) Curious Animals and Quirky Creatures - (Children’s Series) https://www.facebook.com/Mahvash.Moht/

VERSE | I FEEL OUT OF TOUCH

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, satire, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment

For all the times when writer’s block has dammed the flow of words. Like a beaver it plugs the essence, but like a force of nature, the floods of creativity bring those dams crashing down. Again and again, hope shimmers at the end of every one of those bottlenecks.

I feel out of touch 
A tad bit rusty 
Cranky and creaky
Tinny and such 
The words clump together 
With a grind and a grate
I wonder if a month away 
Has dulled my tapestry of verse 
Shimmering skeins that advance and traverse 
Embroidering and stitching 
Notions and qualms
Into billowing storms 
Into rippling, sashaying ribbons of calm 
Bewildering phrases that make me guffaw 
Festering sentences painful and raw 
In bobbing waves with lacy edges
In crashing, lashing, tearing deluges 
In twinkling stardust upon my page 
My blinking cursor running away 
With the train of my thoughts to the drum of my heart 
Laughing, singing, assuaging an ache 
Grieving, weeping, caught in the wake 
I wonder if my keyboard, unstirred, unscathed
For two score nights and forty days 
Has borne my quickening string away.
Image: The New York Times

VERSE | BEDROOM PRISMS

On By Mahvash K. M.In hope, Joy, poetry, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
I get out of bed, slowly, numbly
The morning dopamine has not kicked in
In fact, I have no sense of it 
I sigh … that’s never a good sign
It’s going to be one of those days again

I turn off the AC 
The gentle hum that had filled the spaces 
Where my happy hormone should have been racing
Stops. 
I blink slowly  
I look at my bedroom slippers 
Their shadowy forms 
Like yesterday’s leaves
Plucked off by the breeze
Lie on the ground 

I get up and look at my curtains 
Drawn together like knitted brows
Beige-blonde brows in a frown
Censorial, dragging down
I can’t bring myself to touch
Those sulking folds
To draw them back 
In the ritual 
Of morning time

I sit on the stool in front of my dressing table 
I look at the woman
Staring back at me 
Barely visible, her outline perseveres
Reminding me that I am still here
I watch her for a while 
Feeling nothing - vacuous space
And then  
I see something glimmer
At the back in the mirror 

The prism that I had hung up 
A vestigial piece of love 
From a chandelier that has long since 
Ceased to grace the space above
Had caught the first ray of light 
That had tried to flow
Into my chamber of shadows 
Teasing, romancing it
Holding, embracing it
In all its radiant rainbow hues 

I turn around towards this scene 
Of sudden brightness 
I get up, pull back the curtain 
Just a little bit. The colours
Fall in shimmering streams
Across my feet
I lift one up and then the other
I slowly dance with the rainbow of colour 
My blood gushes warm, I have to smile
It doesn’t seem like another dog day after all.

VERSE | SPACES

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, serenity, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
I sit with my tea
The silence sits with me
Deafeningly 
Piercing my eardrums 
With its wordless cacophony 

It has made its forever home 
In the lounge where I now sit alone 
It’s been there a while
Years of rooting itself in place 
The air, the space 
Is soundless, still 
Like the world in night’s numbing vigil 
I look around for something 
Anything to cut through the dead air
Its atoms conspiring 
With the silence that sits everywhere 

And then I see it, a little plume
Floating, dancing in the room
From my mug
As the tea steams up
Severing the bond of silence and air
The desolate, deflated, joyless pair
Their essence once filled
With people now gone 
The moist vapor wafts in
Reaching into spaces 
Where images, reminiscences
Lie inert, forsaken
Loosening, thawing, warming them

I take a sip of my tea
I feel my spine tingle 
Familiarly
As I’m wrapped in the arms
Of rekindled memories.

VERSE | BE STILL MY BEATING HEART

On By Mahvash K. M.In writingLeave a comment 
Be still my beating heart 
It’s only the setting sun 
With its fiery orange hues 
Tinged with scarlet and indigo
They’re the colours of a day that’s done
Be still my beating heart 
It’s only the setting sun 

Be still my racing blood 
It’s only the ocean wide 
Its waves unfurling liquid lace 
Onto my upturned, sun-warmed face
As I leap into the rushing tide
Be still my racing blood 
It’s only the ocean wide 

Be still my aching breast 
It’s only a trail in the greenwood glade 
Hemmed on the edges with wild flowers 
Glistening in the wake of a spring shower 
It’s only the whispering leaf dappled shade 
Be still my aching breast 
It’s only a trail in the greenwood glade 

Be still my breathless lungs 
It’s only the afternoon sky
With a rainbow that has looped around 
The azure blueness like a crown 
A beautiful palette of pastel dyes 
Be still my breathless lungs
It’s only the after-rain sky

Be still my quickening breath
It’s only the lover’s first kiss
You’ve been on that road before
You’ve flown where the eagles soar 
And also curled up where the earthworms live
Be still my quickening breath
It’s only the sweetheart’s first kiss

Be still my beating heart
It’s only the setting sun
The mystical ocean and the greenwood glade 
The after-rain sky and the lover’s kiss
It’s the enchantment that nostalgia has spun
Be still my beating heart
It’s just life in perpetual thrum.

VERSE | THE CONUNDRUM OF BOOK NO. 8

On By Mahvash K. M.In bookworm, newbook, satire, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
7 books down, and I was told
By well meaning friends of the heart
Start
Writing a novel.  Now that would be novel
For someone like me
A lover of the short story
Genre. Honour-ing the demigods
Of the craft
Like Munshi Premchand and Kurt Vonnegut 
Poe, Manto, Chughtai and a glut
Of others
Revered for the grace and form
They built into their pithy tomes
These brothers
And a sister to bring them all home

I also dabbled in poetry
A bit of whimsy, some contrariety
A ravaged spirit or blithe wings
Made my poems weep and sing
But the short story
And flash fiction 
Is where my heart lay 
For 6 of the books
Where my pen strayed
Where the typed word
Lay bare its humming core
To hold words of wisdom
Emotions galore
(Let me disclaim these to be mine
Not of the larger space and time)

7 books like an epoch of weeks
Must of change rustle and speak
But a no-vel, well-no … that’s not for me
Or my pen or my sensibility
William Faulkner that sage divine 
Said it best when he wrote his lines
I paraphrase, this verse to fit:
“A failed short story writer is a novelist
And a short story writer is a failed poet”.

Images: Hamama Tul Bushra

VERSE | TENDER METTLE

On By Mahvash K. M.In hope, poetry, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
The very edge of the building 
The one of glass 
So fragile by day and in the cloak of night 
Catches the last light 
Of the setting sun
Sharp-angled, it thrusts its shoulders 
Into the fiery horizon 
Brave, unmoving 
It makes a stand
It will endure even as its heart
Of delicate, shattery glass 
Throbs behind curtains of lace 
Fluttering against its radiant face
Glittering, it plucks at the setting rays 
Shining swords drawn against 
The darkening skies 
And tomorrow’s daylight 
Until twilight when it will remind
The concrete world again 
That it still stands
It still prevails, gleaming, upright.
Image: Stained Glass Inc.

REVIEWS | ONE FLEW OVER THE BULBUL’S NEST

On By Mahvash K. M.In newbook, writingLeave a comment

The book is available via the below platforms:

AMAZON.COM: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBLVFRGR?dplnkId=512e7492-0294-4d2e-9f50-dd616e1dec29&nodl=1

AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DBLVFRGR?dplnkId=8028d047-b8b3-4a3d-8b8f-09b8a1dc3ab9&nodl=1

KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/in/en/ebook/one-flew-over-the-bulbul-s-nest-and-other-stories

GOOGLE PLAY: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=ETkgEQAAQBAJ

VERSE | THE ROSE

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, writingLeave a comment 
I looked in rapture at the rose 
As it waxed in the sun
A bold and brilliant orange 
In its emerald column

It was absolutely perfect! 
Its beauty was sublime 
There was little reason 
In the soil to bide its time

I felt a maddening urge
To pluck it off its stem
To put it in a vase
To covet that lovely gem

The sunset-coloured rose
Would glorify my room
The garden would do without
This one splendid bloom

The yen turned to despair
That rose I had to have 
And so the stem that held the bloom
Felt the force of my bare hands 

The break, it was not clean
Nor did it cleave in two
The stem that bore the rose
From the part that bore the roots 

The rose hung limply down now
Its head grazing the ground
Its petals seemed to fold in
As it moaned without a sound

I watched its resplendence 
Its spirit and its mirth
Flow out of it bit by bit
Back into mother earth

A lancing stab came tearing in
Somewhere around my heart
I had mauled and ravaged
Nature’s precious art

I can still see the rose 
As it lay waning in the sun
Like a little cut that never heals
The memory of it still thrums.

VERSE | DI-STRAW-T

On By Mahvash K. M.In Foot in the Mouth, poetry, satire, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
She puts it down in front of me
A bottle of water and a glass
With a straw
(Not plastic - Greta T.
Would probably be somewhat happy)
I especially ask for it, I know
It reeks of faux gentility
To sip one’s water from a glass
With a rim, sculpted for your lips
To gently settle on it and draw
Up The water. But the straw
Has replaced that intimacy 
Between the aqua glass and me
It wasn’t always like this
This distancing of my lips
But unending hopelessness
Pandemics of malaise 
Squatted time and again
Upon the rim, insidious and grim
Where there should have been
Pure bevel, clean, pristine 
Or at the very least
Conclaves of mellow disease
That didn’t bleed dry and deplete 
The very life blood out of me
So now you know
Why I use uncoupling straws
Indifferent, cool, gappy
(Paper-made, eco-friendly)
An arms-length defense strategy 
To keep myself malady free.

Image: Jean-Antoine Watteau

VERSE | THE BOUGAINVILLEA

On By Mahvash K. M.In hope, plants, poetry, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
O Beauteous one 
This is for you 
For all the times that you have bloomed 
When all around have burrowed deep
Into the coolness of earth’s breast 
Hiding away, biding their time 
Until gentler, lighter climes 
Bestir them in their loamy beds
But you, O Intrepid one 
You have always overcome
You have worn your gem-like garb
In ways that made me catch my breath 
Racing, chasing to my heart
Wondering if you’d shimmer on
Or if your time here too was done 
But you wore your jeweled crown 
Glittering in the scorching sun 
I looked at you, O Enchanting one 
As you cavorted with the breeze
Those molten gusts upon my skin 
I gulped in then, the oxygen 
That sat timorously in the air
But I was pulled 
By the oasis that surrounded you 
Perfect, paradisiacal 
Unsundered by the elements 
There you danced so full of joy
I came to you pulled by the spell 
Of your vividness, O Alluring one 
You swayed your head 
Spangled whorls overspread 
Across the fretwork of your boughs 
Mesmerized I reached out 
Into your magic latticed web 
You pricked me then, O Bewitching one 
Your thorns were invisible, hidden 
I knew then that your glittering grace
Your wild gumption to face the sun 
Aren’t just in the softness of your blooms 
But in the armor you have chiseled from 
The tempests - stormy and searing
I looked at the ruby that had sprung 
On my fingertip that you had stung
It dazzled on my glistening skin 
Its precious seams filling my lungs
My essence and throb, O Wondrous one 
I found that day in the scorching sun.
Image: Fine Art America
Featured

VERSE | I SEE

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, serenity, verse, writingLeave a comment 
LISTEN TO THE POEM BEING READ HERE:  https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSeoMPHkF/
Spring turns to autumn which moults 
Into winter. The winds blow cold 
And the skies are a myriad shades
Of grey. The trees in their glades
Stand stark and naked. Their leaves 
Now mottled, dying underneath
Trampling feet.  Hurrying feet across
Paths well trodden and paths that are lost
In the gloom.  Winter’s dirge
Fills the spaces in between to merge
With the mist.  She throws a blanket
On the quiet world.  And then she touches  
My cheek. I turn my face away and she spreads
Her arms. I’m enveloped from toes to head
From right hand to left. I stand still
And let her feel.  She takes her fill
And then undoes her vapory hold. I finally see 
The path stretching clear ahead of me

📚NEW CHILDREN’S BOOK! 📖

On By Mahvash K. M.In BookReading, bookworm, childrensbooks, newbook, writingLeave a comment

Dear friends and family,

Introducing my 4th and final book in the Curious Animals and Quirky Creatures series: MORE QUIRKY CREATURES, A SNOWMAN, A SUBMARINE AND A SNAIL.

The Curious Animals and Quirky Creatures series is both educational and entertaining as it takes children and their parents/ teachers on fun and informative little journeys through tropical jungles, deep blue seas, steep cliff sides, frozen landscapes and even their own backyards. These books also liberally emphasize the importance of being kind, brave and even silly sometimes.

From the greedy little marmoset monkey, to the submarine looking for friends, to the friendship between a bear and a girl, there are ten little stories in this collectible about delightful and funny creatures.
Every story tells of a little act of courage, humour and kindness as each of the little creatures saves the day in its own little way.

IN SRI LANKA: The book is available at Barefoot, Selyn, Expographics, Pendi, The Jam Fruit Tree and Sarasavi.

IN PAKISTAN: It should be in stores in another month. The other 3 books in the series are available at Liberty Books, Paramount Books and The London Book Company.

IN DUBAI: The series is available with my sister. (Please message me if you’d like to connect with her for the books).

750 books in the series sold to date! So, thank you to all who have bought, read and gifted them 💕
Here’s to #Rasingreaders 🌸