Photograph by Shubham Thakur on Pexels

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From the working collection, The Stories That Repeat Us

A child to be ignored for collected poems

(For Imtiaz Dharker: “It is too early for your Collected Poems”)

there are a few

a petrified child in
headmaster’s office
chaddies ready to get wet

frosted glass on his door
a greatness of name inked
masks the sweaty beating of chest inside

the bruises ashamed dismissed
how will he explain to his mother
who wanted a trophy
not a torn uniform

stitches wouldn’t work
declares headmaster
pristine his word of choice

and all this time
the poor poem
is distracted by a familiar bird
in the window

the bloody parakeets

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Emasculation

he hammered the last nail
in a sculpture
stepped into
own perfection
found
everything that was to be said
has been said

he didn’t realize
that was the last nail in his coffin

social media posts
lent shoulders to his coffin
in death he felt alive

in the cold studio
now lowered in the ground
the nude
looked bewildered
from the painting

why wasn’t he looking at her

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Yogesh Patel received an MBE for literature in the Late Queen’s 2020 Honours List and was shortlisted for the Aryamati Prize 2023. His collection The Rapids (2021) won a Finalist Award in the Indie Book Awards, with an Italian translation published in 2023. Patel edits Skylark, runs Skylark Publications UK, and founded the non-profit Word Masala project to promote literature. Honoured with the Freedom of the City of London and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his credits include LPs, films, radio, a children’s book, fiction, non-fiction, and three poetry collections. Among his awards are the International Pinnacle Accolade Award from Vatayan – Poetry on South Bank and a Co-Op Prize for environmental poetry. He was Poet-of-Honor at New York University in April 2019 and has read at the House of Lords and the National Poetry Library. A poem by Patel is scheduled to travel to the moon aboard a NASA/SpaceX rocket as part of a time capsule of humanity’s cultural record. He was the commended winner of the Faber & Faber FAB Prize 2025 and wrote the winning entry for The Poetry Archive’s WorldView Now 2025. His most recent book is Two and a Half. His writing has appeared in PN Review, The London Magazine, World Literature Today, Indian Literature, Stand, Envoi, Under the Radar, Shearsman, IOTA, Orbis, The Book Review, and Confluence, among others. He has appeared on BBC TV and Radio, and his work features in The National Curriculum Anthology, Macmillan educational series, Sahitya Akademi anthologies, and over fifteen other anthologies worldwide. He writes regular columns for Confluence and is a roaming editor for Ars Notoria.