What they have given back
Critiques written is shown as plainly as poems posted, and reading one costs nothing. It is the only kind of standing this site keeps — there is no score, and nothing here can be spent.
2 critiques written · 2 received
00The Third AirportThe third airport is where the language goes.
Not the first — the first is only leaving,Waiting on a reader01The Year We Stopped Setting a Place for HimThere is a year, and then there is the year after, and somewhere between them a hand stops reaching for the extra plate without anyone deciding it should. Nobody announced it. My mother simply set the table for five instead of six, and none of us said the number out loud, because saying it would have made the empty chair a subject instead of a fact. I used to think faith meant believing he was somewhere. Now I think it means setting five places and trusting that the missing one still counts, somehow, in a ledger none of us can read.1 critique02Instructions for Leaving a CountryTake the photographs out of their frames; the frames are heavier than the years. Take the recipe your mother never wrote down, which means take your mother, which means take the morning she stood over the pot and would not say how much. Leave the plates. Leave the good ones especially — you will not be the kind of person who has occasions for a while.1 critique
A series of their own
Dev Ramanathan's own poems, grouped and ordered by them.