My Body Is A Prison - Zine

A zine by Varsha Panikar from their ongoing mixed-media series, Origami Folds, that employs dreams, memories, archive and photography to explore the human body, and uses it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless fragility and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures, through the lens of south-Asian, queer and marginalized bodies.

Trigger Warning : This piece deals with depression, anxiety, and body dysphoria.

Buy on Amazon Kindle below

https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09BXDWYPL

Origami Folds (Skins)

First published in the zine - Skin - a Marketplace Journal by Forbidden Verses

on 20th March 2021

Download the Zine here.

Giving Up The Ghost

From my series, Whispers To My Shadows.

You ever wish

That you could just rewind?

Go back in time,

And just turn out fine?

Well, I do,

I know that the chances are slim,

That we may not live it again,

But at least, we can imagine.

But when we aren't imagining,

We can't let it flash past again.

We’ve got to use our noses,

And smell the roses,

Take time to live it up.

And win it up,

And while you're at it, hell!

Even sin it up!

So here I am

Wishing and dreaming,

I could live it again.

As I lay here in my bed,

With the same old story in my head.

What could have been?

What would have been?

Or even what should have been?

A ghost,

A shadow,

A memory.

Not quite there,

Not quite clear,

Not quite worth the time.

So for my sake and yours

I think I’ll be finally giving up the ghost,

Because my body was nothing but another host,

I don’t wanna forget the past,

But I’d like to leave it behind.