boyfacts
poetry, summer 2025
Each time I remember how some male spiders consume their females
in sexual cannibalism, I shudder from top to toe. My partner thinks
it’s disturbing to be fascinated by this. When I was seven, in Jalpaiguri,
a ragshirt rickshaw man had asked me if I’d remember him decades later.
I will find you somewhere again— his toothblanked grin biting hard down
my memory’s flesh. Of course, I was a beautiful boy. I licked the mirror clean.
Each night I memorised the dial tone’s patient Morse, waiting for Dad to call.
Even if it’s another life, he had said. Even then. I knew this was all I had—
a hand-me-down of promises. A body that consumes desire in moderation.
Within the humid walls of this body, sometimes I prayed for a chapel for snow.
Oh, to stay beautiful forever. To be the boy thrusting whole flowers into his mouth.
The boy who wakes and remembers his unbroken syntax like an obedient clock.
When an old song outchimes his afternoon, the boy now sits upon the balcony
with his legs out hanging and watches the sullen street, as if waiting for something.
practice makes
perfect
I hugged around my mother her last latitude, the tropic of
cancer no longer a line she was afraid to cross. Around her:
hospital bleach, ink-red rags, tall jungle of tubes, masculine trees
pressing oxygen into her lungs, the machinists who haven’t spoken
a word in years, small Buddhas whose nods keep count of bodies
piling in the harvest pits of the Earth. Wilting dahlias that knew.
Because nothing moved, I shook myself to unclog the dream.
I counted backwards, smoked under the spotlight of cabin windows,
whispered goodnight mum and mothered the birds falling in my chest.
Regret drained the stars all night— the shocking pinprick rain.
In the corridor’s eternity, I paced the aircon's synthetic spell.
As a child, when she left me alone, sometimes I considered her forever
gone, a make-believe grief whose contours I wanted to touch and taste.
On my lips, the empty corridor’s fingertips promised me nothing
but absence, the speechless scalpel I could always cut myself with,
the sorry reckoning that a lonely child starts early to prepare for.
And when it really happened and shortly before and aeons after,
as the machines beeped and blurred, as the room reeled and revolved,
I only sat holding her hand. I shook it. I shook both our bruises alive.
DEBMALYA BANDYOPADHYAY
(he/him) is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. He is in the 2025 cohort of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. He is the runner-up of the UK National Poetry Coaches Slam 2025, was a finalist for Sweet Literary’s Poetry Prize, Sophon Lit’s Poetry Contest, and the Briefly Write Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, HAD, Chestnut Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. He is often in parks confabulating with local birds. Find him on Instagram @halfmoonmilkshake , X @halfmoonwhiskey , and BlueSky @halfmoonmocha.