#umang kalra

[beguines]

Umang Kalra, "Job Security"

[yoggybloggy]

souvenir, boygenius // explain the world to me, i want it through your eyes, umang kalra

[ashiqui]

for @safins ♡

laini taylor, muse of nightmares / girl meets world, 3x09 / philip pullman, the amber spyglass / @nashpati (x) / @holly-warbs (x) / marie-helene bertino / normal people, 1x12 / @inkskinned (x) / (x) / umang kalra (x) / the good place, 4x09 / amal el-mohtar and max gladstone, this is how you lose the time war / joseph lorusso, playing their song / @holly-warbs (x) / kurt vonnegut, mother night

[alocasiamag]

"At the end of the next apocalypse when all the people are gone, will the internet try to kill everything else? What do the mushrooms think?" —Umang Kalra :: “REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US THE MUSHROOMS COULD TALK” https://alocasia.org/2022/12/12/umang-kalra-remember-when-they-told-us-the-mushrooms-could-talk-3/

[orangerosebush]

Umang Kalra :: “REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US THE MUSHROOMS COULD TALK”, in Alocasia, a journal of queer plant-based writing (link).

Think the above poem and journal are cool? If so, consider sending a submission of your own. I'll attach the journal's About/Send Work selection below!

ALOCASIA accepts creative writing of all genres from queer writers on a rolling basis with no reading fee. Please send no more than 6 pieces to ALOCASIAmagazine@gmail.com. Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, and we DO accept previously-published work. Please send writing in either .docx or .pdf format.

We appreciate both traditional work, as well as the weird, erotic, explicit, anti-colonial, and whatever you can come up with.

This is a journal about plants, gardens, gardening, parks, and indoor horticulture. Please don’t send us work that isn’t about plants.

ALOCASIA requests First North American Serial Rights from previously unpublished work. ALOCASIA requests Reprint Rights, Electronic Archival Rights, and Anthology Rights from all work you agree to publish with them. They pay $10 per contributor. Their ISSN is 2831-8404.

[beestungmag]

"what of water, of surveillance, of psychiatry, of all our other cities? will you build them again, this time greater?" —Umang Kalra Read more in beestung #14 https://beestungmag.com/issue14/one-poem-by-umang-kalra/

[alicenthighstower]

i notice u are a fellow greta/carson poetry enjoyer, I'd like to humbly recommend anniversary by louise gluck which is sad one, or (and i've recommended her before but she's so good) the end of poetry and/or love poem with apologies for my appearance by ada limón for some sweet ones :)

oh anon these are beautiful! louise glück and ada limón always, always get me. I've loved the end of poetry for a while but the others are new to me so thanks very much <3 I have a feeling you'll love filling spice jars as your wife by kai coggin, and explain the universe to me, i want it through your eyes by umang kalra (both sweet), and córdoba by eduardo corral (much sadder)

[bostonpoetryslam]

i want to be your little grocery lists! i want to be your sky! i want to become the sound of you laughing and the sound of your gasps and the sound of your breathing and the sound of your dreams. i would like to learn you from scratch.

Umang Kalra, “EXPLAIN THE UNIVERSE TO ME, I WANT IT THROUGH YOUR EYES,” published in DEAR

[mantisblues]

do u have any love poems baby

hiii <3 yes i do

“EXPLAIN THE UNIVERSE TO ME, I WANT IT THROUGH YOUR EYES” by Umang Kalra

[ID: “i want to love you like the sun, so loud even / if it destroys us. tell me what it tastes like to watch me melting and maybe / i will tell you instead, surprise surprise, i survived it all for you.”]

“be kind to me” by sappho

[ID: “Be kind to me / Gongyla; I ask only / that you wear the cream / white dress when you come / Desire darts about your / loveliness, drawn down in / circling flight at sight of it / and I am glad, although / one I too quarreled with Aphrodite / to whom / I pray that you will / come soon”]

“if i love you” by e. e. cummings

[ID: “if i love You / (thickness means / worlds inhabited by roamingly / stern bright faeries / if you love / me) distance is mine carefully / luminous with innumerable gnomes / of complete dream / if we live each (shyly) / other, what clouds do or Silently / Flowers resembles beauty / less than our breathing”]

from letters from medea by salma deera

[ID: “and you laugh. / loudly– / head tipping back. / and while your eyes / are on the ceiling, / i am mouthing / something too heavy even / for this steady night to shoulder. / ‘this is not a joke.’ i mouth. / ‘love me. love me.’”]

“Simone” by Shauna Barbosa

[ID: “7:30, an odd hour. ‘Are we to have dinner before or after class?’ Was Simone asking me to dinner? A man I don’t know steals her attention I keep walking hungry then stop rustle around with my bag watch them talk each day feels like February frozen on a beach chair. Imagined making love to her not knowing where to begin. Thought about going slow the way he says I don’t like. Each day each day a phone call a voice with good news a promise to return with more information.”]

[lifeinpoetry]

Nobody teaches little girls how to love without sounds that sound like pain. Nobody teaches little girls how to love without somebody watching them pretend that it feels good.

— Umang Kalra, from “My Vagina Was Not an Orchid,” published in Glass

[theanatomyletter]

Rothko and the Engineering of Suffocation

I’ve always had a strange fascination with ~~abstract art & what that abstraction means & what it is trying to achieve. I think two of the most common metrics for whether art is “good” are 1. Does it make me feel things? and 2. Is it doing what it set out to do? While the two overlap, the second gets tricky when you’re trying to wrestle with whether the intentions of art are valuable or not, not just whether they are achieved. How does intention create expectation? And what the hELL do u do with art that does so much more than it intended or knows? To whom do u ascribe that achievement? Is art still “good” if it doesn’t even know about most of its goodness? And then does that get “credited” to the artist, or the weird kind of amorphous idea of the “art” itself? Idk tbh.

Anyway the thing with Rothko is he went so much further than just wanting his art to do certain things, he described and necessitated and created environments and essentially instructions for what his paintings were meant to do and !!!! I think it is really incredible that they do those things!!!!!! He’s said he wants his paintings to make the viewer feel like they want to bang their head against a wall, he wanted windowless-ness, oppressive walls and big, scary colours, emotion distilled into weirdly soft edges where one colour not so much as bleeds but rather shuffles onto the next with strokes that resemble nothing but just, art. It is a movement and a pattern reminiscent of itself -- of the art and form and act of painting, of the modernity of the painter and their audience and the strange embodiment of pure emotion that is created within the intentional manipulation of colour, a goal that was so strange in its newness and so brave and reckless with breaking conceptions of what art is meant for and what it can do. Rothko’s time was tinged with a self awareness of people attaching to movements and schools and endeavours of creativity, working towards self defined goals of what art could and was meant to achieve. Is it a valuable intention then, to make the viewer want to bang their head against a wall? What is so fascinating and compelling about the Rothko Chapel, a place where people feel god, or Rothko’s room in the Tate, where he insisted on darkness and gloom and separation and wanted the viewer to feel trapped, even afraid?

I’m not saying that that is in any way a dishonourable goal, and the 20th century certainly had room for a reckoning with art beyond what feels good. I wonder simply about the strangeness and specific desire for him not only to want his art to do something, and not only asking the viewer to comply, but creating an atmosphere of oppressiveness (physical, almost) within which the viewing must take place and insisting on compliance, bending the rules a bit about what a “painting” is allowed to do. The art, then, stops remaining confined to its object, and invades the space in which we breathe, exist, walk, see. It’s a sort of encroachment that happens entirely on the artist’s terms. It is difficult to look at a Rothko and then just look away, it is a hypnotising, compelling, magnetic, fascinating experience, because everything is blurry but simultaneously sharp, and every colour seems to know something you don’t and you are at the mercy of a force (created by a man who is now dead, crucially) of manipulation, essentially, and a weird sense of (culturally, socially enforced? conditioned? confused?) enjoyment in that feeling. It’s messy and weird to be drawn to something that essentially just gives you a bit of a headache and makes you want to be able to focus your eyes on something that won’t keep slipping in and out of blurry sharpness.

Curiosity is probably at the heart of a lot of good art, maybe even all good art, a sense of wanting and desire and maybe even illicit fear-stained admiration for a thing that makes you so deeply uncomfortable with no clear purpose for doing so. But there is pleasure too, so much pleasure, besides the headache-y environment and the confusion, a Rothko is plainly beautiful to look at, it is nearly always a gorgeous flow of one space into the next bordered with a softness that is impossible to find outside of a painting -- it’s created its own self in its goal, it has established an emotion that exists nowhere else, and it stares at you with a disarming self awareness. There is still a strangeness in being subject to emotion like that, we all watch sad movies and read sad books, yeah, but that is different because someone else is sad and we can either relate or empathise but here??? Nobody is sad. Nobody is stressed. Nobody external to you is experiencing that nausea, the confusion, the glaring defiance against pure pleasure, not even the artist. Especially not the artist, at least not with you. Yet this creation of displeasure is distinctly deemed Good Art & I think it is extremely fascinating why, & even more fascinating that so many of us keep signing up to be subject to this weird experience of stress and wonder laced brazenly with discomfort.  

[yoggybloggy]

wait just double checking have we all read explain the world to me i want it through your eyes by umang kalra

[umangkalra]

Click here to read my essay “ROTHKO AND THE ENGINEERING OF SUFFOCATION” about abstract expressionism, headaches, museums, paint, and more, published in THE ANATOMY LETTER. 

[cunning-kitchen]

HANDS KNEES PLEASE by Umang Kalra (from metaphor alert - gilmore girls extravaganza )

[alocasiamag]

new alocasia’s here 💚💚💚

ALOCASIA #3 is here! We're bursting to finish out the year with you, and lots of queer plant-based writing Feat. Briar Ripley Page, Grace Embers, Robin Kinzer, Nnadi Samuel, Audrey L. Reyes, Joy Su, Chloe Chou, Trinity Nguyen, Umang Kalra, & Jo Güstin http://ALOCASIA.org

[beestungmag]

Congratulations to beestung's 2024 Best of the Net nominees in poetry! Travis Hedge Coke • Emerald Anastasia • Umang Kalra • Young Fenimore Lee • Zoë Fay-Stindt • KB Read their work at www.beestungmag.com/issues/