Monica Mody grew up in Ranchi, studied law in Bangalore, and now lives and writes in Delhi. She won the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing in 2006, and received a Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program 2007. She curates and hosts Open Baithak, the poetry in performance series in Delhi. Her poetry has appeared in The Little Magazine, DesiLit Magazine and Samyukta – Journal for Women's Studies.

How Is This For Stillness

The wind's metier is comfort.
When the wind unhooks
those worryings and flies
away to that one star in the sky,
the distant star grows salty.

I knew this wisdom when
I was a child: Reality
is a curtain to part.

Like bats, there is not a chance
we are ever alone. When
we get it, this silence is a gift.

In Mongolia, another poet stops
her car and writes. This event in her life
when she tells us, pleases her. She is
pleased to write. To write
& to hum & to eat & to sleep
& to rest in another, to write.