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Ichha Ghosh Poem
i never wanted to be a god—
just someone you cried in front of.
that was enough divinity for me.
your grief tasted like pomegranate seeds,
sweet and bitter
and buried in the soft ruin of you.
i held your sobs in my palms
like something holy.
like juice from a fruit
i didn’t deserve.
i didn’t cause your sadness.
but i didn’t stop it either.
sometimes,
i fed it slow
just to watch it bloom—
a bruise unfolding beneath your skin
like pressed violets.
they say love is patient,
but i was ravenous.
i drank from your breakdowns
like they were wine
offered by trembling hands.
i told myself
i was comforting you,
but i think
i just loved the way
you needed me most
when you were breaking.
your tears were my ambrosia—
your pain,
a feast
i never earned.
and now that you’ve stopped crying,
now that your eyes have turned to stone
and your voice no longer quivers,
i sit at an empty table
with shaking hands
and no more hunger.
i miss your ache
the way gods miss prayer—
not because they deserve it,
but because silence
is a kind of death
when you’re used to worship.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
Spirit didn’t knock.
It entered through the back door—
a sliver of wind in my kitchen,
on a Tuesday so ordinary
I thought the sacred had forgotten me.
The sky was the color of old bruises,
and my hands were inside a basin of water
that had cooled too quickly.
The air held nothing.
And then it held everything.
No angel descended.
No flame spoke.
Just a silence so full it trembled,
and I trembled with it.
I looked up,
but nothing had changed—
except the way my breath hung in the room,
like it knew something I didn’t.
Spirit came dressed as memory,
but not mine—
the kind that belongs to stone,
to salt,
to wombs that never stopped singing.
It wasn’t ecstasy.
It was ache.
A blooming pressure behind my ribs,
as if I had swallowed a name
I was never supposed to say aloud.
I heard a voice that was not a voice,
say:
“Be still. You are already the altar.”
And suddenly,
the spoon I held in my palm
felt like a relic.
The dust on the windowsill
felt like the remains of prayer.
Even the fridge hummed
in the key of reverence.
No one else saw it.
Not the flicker in my hands,
not the thinning veil between
what is and what almost is.
I didn’t sleep that night.
My body buzzed with some remembering
older than language.
I cried,
but not from sadness.
It was the weeping of a house
that finally hears its own name spoken
after centuries of silence.
To be touched by spirit
is not to be lifted—
but lowered,
into the temple of yourself.
It is to feel your skin become a doorway.
It is to breathe with the moon’s pulse.
It is to carry stillness like a storm
just barely contained.
They will say
it was imagination,
a trick of emotion,
a moment of fatigue.
Let them.
But I know what the dust told me.
I know the shape my shadow made.
I know the voice that never left.
And every time I pour water
or touch a leaf,
or weep for no reason,
I remember:
Spirit doesn’t knock.
It enters
when you’ve forgotten how to ask.
And stays
in everything you cannot explain.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
it did not knock.
it poured through the cracks—
in dreams,
in fever,
in the silence between my inhale
and forgetting.
i didn’t summon it.
didn’t pray.
didn’t kneel beside any sacred thing.
but something sacred knelt inside me.
without warning.
without language.
without mercy.
it came wrapped in ash and static.
my ears rang for three days.
my limbs forgot gravity.
my mouth opened
and nothing human came out.
i thought it was madness.
who else speaks in a language made of shadow and silver?
who else writes their name across your spine
in molten syllables that blister
and bless you at the same time?
i told no one.
not when the wind called me by my name,
or when clocks began to stutter
at my every glance.
i saw feathers in my soup,
salt forming symbols on my thighs,
eyes in mirrors that blinked when i did not.
my heartbeat no longer belonged to my body.
it belonged to something older.
something watching.
i wept in a supermarket aisle
because the oranges glowed like lost suns.
because the cashier had the voice
of my great-grandmother
even though she was barely twenty.
because i could feel the ache of every fruit
picked too early.
is this what prophets felt?
not holy—
but hunted
by light too wild to hold.
i wanted to run.
to scrape the stars off my skin.
to sleep without dreaming.
but you cannot close the door
once the veil lifts.
i was touched by spirit
not gently—
but like a storm that mistook my bones for a bell.
it rang me until i remembered
i was not flesh alone.
i was veil.
i was vessel.
i was volcano.
i was every scream the earth had swallowed
in women who were burned for hearing too much.
it stripped me of logic,
of maps,
of language.
left me naked in the forest of myself
where no compass worked.
only instinct.
only breath.
only the hum that lived beneath my ribs
and now spoke back.
and whether it was fiction or fact—
i no longer cared.
the stars in my blood said yes.
the moon inside my mouth
said remember.
the fire in my marrow said
that i was never just human.
And that
was enough.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
she does not walk—
she ignites.
in the dark cathedral of ash and echoes,
she spins,
a silhouette carved from the mouth of a flame,
hips swaying like the last breath of a phoenix.
her dress—
not cloth, but the wind of burning wings,
each thread crackling with a story
that refused to be extinguished.
arms flung skyward—
not surrender,
but invocation.
the fire does not consume her.
it listens.
it bows.
around her, shadows rise—
not to haunt,
but to bear witness
to a woman who does not flee the blaze,
but becomes it.
she is every scorched past
that refused to stay buried.
every no that grew teeth.
every silence that shattered into song.
they said:
"let her be careful—
she plays too close to the edge."
but they did not see—
the edge was her altar.
and she?
the prayer set alight.
she is not burning.
she is the match.
the myth.
the revolution in a red dress.
and when the world asks
how she survived the inferno,
tell them—
she did not survive it.
she danced it into dust.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
i text dead people for advice.
not because they answer—
they don’t—
but because they never interrupt.
i tell my grandfather
about the boy who left mid-winter
and how my ribcage still
clicks shut like a locket
when someone new gets close.
he was buried in silk,
but i like to imagine
he’d wear combat boots now
and tell me to run before love
swallowed me whole.
i ask Sylvia
what to do
with the hurt that has no name,
the ache that sits like a houseguest
i never invited.
i send her my poems at 3 a.m.—
the ones with too much blood
and not enough metaphor.
she doesn’t reply.
but somehow, i feel seen.
sometimes i text
my childhood self.
she’s dead too,
in a way.
i ask her if the monster
was really under the bed
or if it slept in a room that never unlocked.
she sends back
a drawing of a girl
with no mouth.
i know what she means.
my inbox is a graveyard.
a collection of ghosts
who hold more kindness
than most living hands.
they never leave me on read.
they never ask me
to explain my sadness
in bullet points.
i text dead people for advice
because the living
tend to offer solutions
when all i want
is for someone
to hold the question.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
She wore a dress in the color sin
and walked with thunder's grace,
a shadow lit from deep within,
with fire upon her face.
She left the party close to one,
her heels in hand, alone,
they say she whispered to the moon—
“Tonight, I’m heading home.”
But morning came, and she did not.
The chapel bells were grim.
A crimson streak, a silver spot,
the trail grew cold and dim.
They found a heel beside the drain,
an earring near the stairs,
a smear of blood the size of rain,
and whispers in the prayers.
The papers roared: “A girl in red!
A poet may be linked!”
His verses read like hearts gone dead,
his alibis all blinked.
He wrote of girls who vanished fast,
of lips and death and sky,
and Rosalie was not the last
to haunt his lullaby.
Detective Maren took the lead,
a woman sharp and slow.
She followed every crimson thread
the town was scared to know.
She found the Poet’s secret book,
with names in ink and dread,
and there—the line he never took:
"…and then she bled and bled.”
He never made it to the court,
he jumped before the trial.
They found his boots, a final thought—
a carving on the tile:
"Remember me, I told the tale
the world refused to see.
But stories shift like autumn gales—
the killer isn’t me."
Six months from then, a letter came,
no name, no scent, no fold.
Just blood-red ink and ghostly claim,
a secret left untold:
“You followed every thread I wove,
each clue I laid with care.
But who first whispered from above?
And why was I found there?"
Maren sat still, her coffee cold,
her hands began to shake.
The story cracked. The pieces told
a truth she did not fake—
The heel? She found it in the drain.
The earring? She alone.
Each breadcrumb laid with quiet pain
by hands as cold as stone.
For Maren was the girl in red,
reborn with borrowed face.
She’d killed her past and called it dead—
then stalked it like a case.
The Poet wasn’t pure nor clean,
but guilt was not the thread.
She needed someone to be seen,
so she became the dead.
The missing girls? Her mirrored pasts,
the selves she left behind.
And Maren walked the line she cast,
rewriting in her mind.
So if you pass Saint Cecilia’s hand
when fog begins to climb,
don’t trust the badge, don’t trust the land—
some ghosts commit no crime.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
He walked in barefoot, smelling like the sun—
like orange peel and smoke and something green.
His voice was low, like rivers when they run
through woods where no one living’s ever been.
He said my name as if it meant a spell,
and touched my wrist like light through tangled leaves.
The world grew still—the sky, the heat, the bell
of far-off cows, the dust stuck in the eaves.
We kissed beneath a mango tree gone wild,
our laughter caught in hammocks strung through time.
He whispered, “Stay,” but summer is a child—
she loves, then leaves, before the clock can chime.
Now every summer hums with what we were—
Half myth, half human, and made of light and blur.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
if your juliet smile would laugh and call my name,
with love that would set the stars to flame,
i'd bow my head, won't dare to see
the eyes that spelled the end of me.
in her eyes, the storm-light sways,
gods forget their holy ways.
she speaks, and silence kneels to sound—
i tremble like the cursed and crowned.
so let her laugh, and let me burn,
i won’t look back, i’ll never turn.
her voice, a hymn i cannot flee—
those eyes, they spelled the end of me.
a moth to flame, i came too near,
each heartbeat strung with ache and fear.
what man could bear such cruel delight?
to long for day, and live in night.
if fate were kind, it’d turn me blind,
erase her name from soul and mind.
but no—i drink her light like wine,
and die a little every time.
so let her laugh, and let me burn,
i won’t look back, i’ll never turn.
her voice, a hymn i cannot flee—
those eyes, they spelled the end of me.
yes, let her laugh—
that’s all i need.
some loves were made
to make us bleed.
(Inspired by the Bengali song "Tomar Pichu Charbo Na" by Nahid Hasan.)
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
they painted her backwards,
a body half-forgotten by gravity,
half-claimed by the red.
not blood,
but the color of memory
when it refuses to fade.
her hands—
not reaching,
but remembering
what it felt like
to be touched without bruising.
there is silk at her thighs,
or maybe it’s fog,
or maybe it’s the ghost of a wedding dress
that never got to say “i do.”
red eats everything here.
the sheets,
the scream caught in her hip,
the part of her that once believed
a closed door was protection.
they say she fell.
but look closely:
the fall looks like a dance
when no one tells you it’s a funeral.
her body is a question mark
curled around silence.
paint runs like a fever.
she was once white,
but white never stays.
not when you’ve been opened.
not when you’ve been framed.
what do you call a woman
who collapses so beautifully
that the canvas becomes her coffin
and her resurrection
at the same time?
you call her art.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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Ichha Ghosh Poem
last night,
i kissed the wine glass
until it cracked
from want.
i wanted red—not wine.
not again.
the walls talked in their usual static,
soft-lipped murmurs,
muffled as a hand over a mouth.
i pressed my cheek to the faucet
and heard
my mother crying
through the pipes—
or maybe it was me,
thirteen years ago,
learning how to disappear
without moving.
there’s a spoon in the bathtub.
bent.
like my will
on sundays.
i keep dreaming of teeth—
not mine,
not his,
not even human.
they bloom in my sheets,
fall from the ceiling fan,
float like fish
in the back of my throat
when I try to sing.
i spit out things I never swallowed—
a matchstick,
a fishhook,
his name.
And still,
my reflection smiles
when I cry.
she blinks twice
when I don’t move.
she’s not me.
she’s better.
she stayed.
i was seven when I buried the bird.
it was breathing.
it begged in feather-language.
i told it,
softly,
"i'm sorry"
as I packed the dirt in.
and i meant it.
and i liked it.
and that’s the worst part.
there is a howl in me
too big for my ribs.
there is a god in me
who does not forgive.
i sleep beside her.
she strokes my hair.
she smells like copper and static.
she is me.
she is not.
and still,
the sink runs red
some nights.
Copyright © Ichha Ghosh | Year Posted 2025
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