Ishani Ray

Ishani Ray is a queer South Asian writer and researcher based in New York City, with a background in science and medicine that informs her creative lens. She writes poetry as a way to give voice to thoughts that resist easy articulation such as exploring politics, social justice, power, longing, nature, and the romanticism of everyday life. Her poems have been published in a chapbook, as well as in Eunoia Review, Foofaraw Press, Lucky Jefferson, Letters From Milena, MidLVMag, Poets in Verse, Articoli Liberi N. 12 and Sepulchre Literary Zine. She was a finalist in Lucky Jefferson's Poetry and Prose Contest. She maintains blogs on Medium and WordPress, the latter titled Notes from the Margin. When not writing or working in the lab, she fosters rescue kittens and obsesses over old libraries.

Of What We Do Not Name (POEM)

I do not know this world entire—
but my cat, pacing through the dim,
deciphers secrets curled in the folds of wind,
hears the tick of a beetle in the dust,
marks shadows that even dusk forgets.

She listens to the hush
between a radiator’s exhale
and the creak of floorboards’ slow settling—
the quiet syntax
of a house falling asleep.

The sun, in its final stretch,
threads gold through the torn lace
of maple leaves,
dressing the dying in something divine.

Dusk does not introduce itself,
It arrives like a guest we never really know
but welcome anyway,
and my cat does not flinch.

She drapes herself along the sill,
a silhouette of watching,
the faintest curl in her tail
suggesting she knows something
she won’t tell.

The porch lamp flickers into shape—
a blue haze, a beckoning
for the stray passerby,

For the moth brushing its wing
against the glass,
for the echo nesting in the stairwell,
for the owl’s silent wing,
for the cat—waiting—
poised—
at the cusp
of everything
we do not name.