20. Vidya Premkumar ~ a way of living

“Ustopia is a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia—the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.”
—Margaret Atwood

Vidya Premkumar’s poetry is a necessary reminder that socio-political topics such as healthcare, capitalism, trauma, religion, and motherhood are shared experiences that transcend national borders. Tapping into subgenres like feminism, philosophy, science, and horror, Premkumar’s poems often combine seasonal variation and natural elements with the harsh effects of trying to survive systems that are designed against her. The brevity and intimacy of haiku and senryu are highly compatible with the delicate, sensitive subjects in Premkumar’s work, as she effortlessly utilizes common haiku craft tools like kire and sensory input, as well as Japanese aesthetics like wabi-sabi and mono no aware. The language she chooses is sometimes haunting, but it consistently amplifies the author’s objectives and solidifies her distinct poetic voice. Premkumar writes from a place of passion and motivation to salvage the remnants of an ongoing fractured society and rebuild a world in which it feels safe to raise future generations. Premkumar’s poetic universe is a place where utopia meets dystopia, a place where protest and resilience are a way of living, and a place where it will always be the beginning of an end.

Rowan Beckett Minor, confluence associate editor

barely open sunflowers on radioactive soil

rolling blanket of fog invoiced fear

the beginning of the end
sanity in strait-waistcoats

grief the tomb I looked

event horizon
the endless bellies
of my black cats

your trauma a thin layer of guilt around my motherhood

tailgating my mother’s history mine

surviving capitalism wildflowers in winter

dark web the gutter mind runs into a reservoir

tolling in crisp white ghosts sunday church bells

my irritation
with ex-husband and son—
Mandelbrot set

mid-winter's alchemy distilling sunlight

nihilism
an ice cream truck
with children’s bodies

bitten apple the sin is in the sourcing

a way of living kanyini

through Marxist wormholes the history of hegemony

phantom portals —
children vanish into air
at chore o’clock

gravity folding the morning into my spine

not/still in my name

deep sleep
         exhaustion
the regularity
        the long spell
of a pendulum
        of a steel sky

drip drying
hand washed clothes
my poem
crumpled in papers
until it's a monoku

House Tour

There are rooms I’ve locked behind stitched seams, others the surgeons emptied—quiet as winter kitchens, clean as confession. My breasts, my ovaries, my uterus—taken like furniture removed while the house still stood. Still, somewhere in this architecture, I find lipstick on the mirror, old songs echoing behind the sternum, hips that remember dancing, and blood that hums in a pitch only daughters and rebels know. The doctors revised the blueprint, but the blueprint was never the body. Womanhood—unhoused but unlost—climbs the walls like ivy. Stubborn, green, mispronounced.

bone-windowed body—
even the dust
doesn’t know its name

Room 19

Lessing and Woolf understood—
every mother, every wife
craved a quiet corner
in a worn-out motel,
where the wine is cheap,
the food greasy,
and the TV hums its dull lullaby.
A place where doing nothing
is the only thing to do—
no art, no verse,
no novels to write or threads to weave,
no fashion, no masks to wear.
Just the soft embrace
of a white hotel robe,
skin untouched by soap,
eyes tracing the outline
of concrete against the sky.

sewer vine the toddler at the mother’s waist

Natural Stopwatches

radioactive dating the steady decay of a relationship

Every time she fell sick, there was a pause. The crust of trust that had developed from the previous incident suddenly becomes brittle—I dig to find the reason for the deterioration of her health. She is an anomaly that baffles even the doctors. We detected her arrhythmia 25 years ago. It occurred because the edge of a stool hit her hard on the chest, and she did not mention it to us, allowing it to heal naturally. That was the first time I paused and reconsidered the issues in our relationship, stemming from her wish not to disturb a married daughter and add to her load.

localized irregularity the patterns of parenting

She refused to take an aspirin to keep the clots at bay. Doctors threw in the towel and gave her a couple of years to walk this earth. She ate sparsely, worked rigorously, and shunned her family's concerns. In believing herself to be nature’s child, her brain appeared like a night sky on the MRI scan when she had her first stroke 25 years later. As I held her scan and gazed at it, time stopped again. She was a woman of science, and I wondered how she did not see that if nature gave her the body, it also provided her with science, its advancements, and the medicines. It also gave her a daughter who wanted to be there for her. I found a sediment of resentment built over the years beneath the calm waters of my practicality.

interstellar collision
the compressed heliosphere
of childhood

After a year and a half of struggling with partial paralysis and the frustration of a highly active mind trapped in an incapable body, she suffered her second stroke while I was away in a city that took 12 hours to reach. This time, the answers to the stroke lay in the neatly stapled, unopened packets of morning medicines that she had not taken. The irrationality of the pattern was stunning; she took all her night medicines but left the morning ones untouched. As I held the packet in my hand and read and reread the name of the one medicine that would have cut down the intensity of her stroke, I pondered over the halfhearted attempt at giving up life; the intensity of looking at only one’s will and desire for life without a thought for the ones living with her, trying to keep her alive and healthy.

This time, it was not Earth’s crust in me but a stalactite of anger in the frozen cave of my mind. But my hands are warm against her cold skin as I pull her into a sitting position.

mycelium –
the confluence
of our symbiosis

For me, poetry is as much a way of making sense of the world as it is a way of unsettling it. I have always written from the seam where the personal and the political meet—where an intimate bruise can illuminate a social wound, and where an image as small as a bitten apple can hold the history of exploitation, desire, and dissent.

Japanese short forms like haiku and tanka have sharpened my instincts for distillation. They demand not just brevity but precision, and that discipline teaches me to strip away the ornamental until only the essential remains. In those few words, I create a space where the poem is not a monologue but a dialogue—the reader enters, bringing their own histories, emotions, and interpretations. The silences between the lines matter as much as the words themselves; they are the shared breath between writer and reader.

A good poem, to me, is not a locked box, but an open window. It offers clarity without closure and resonance without prescription. In the Japanese forms, I have found a way to balance immediacy and implication, to say just enough so that the reader’s mind can leap into what is unsaid. This is how I hold grief, protest, tenderness, and irony in the same small vessel—and let it travel far beyond me.

Cynthia Bale

Vidya Premkumar’s work shows us both sides of imperfection: that which must be changed and that which is just right as it is. She unflinchingly faces the many failings of our contemporary world, particularly through the lens of our consumption under capitalism, whether physical, as in:

bitten apple the sin is in the sourcing

or intellectual, as in:

dark web the gutter mind runs into a reservoir

She describes the fear in:

rolling blanket of fog invoiced fear

as invoiced, demonstrating how even emotion can become warped through the terms of transaction.

However, she also shows us imperfections that are worth celebrating, such as the crumpled poem in

"drip drying"

that comes through its tribulation into a new form as a monoku. Similarly, the moment in Premkumar’s work that affected me most profoundly occurs in her haibun “House Tour”; evaluating herself post-surgery, she concludes,

“the blueprint was never the body.”

It's not only a finely-honed rebuke to the gender essentialism that defines women by the features of their bodies, but also a powerful affirmation for people whose bodies don't fit into the idealized Vitruvian Man template, whatever the reason.

The sunflowers of Premkumar’s monoku:

barely open sunflowers on radioactive soil

are a remarkable synthesis of both types of imperfection—despite lacking the showiness of their cousins planted in healthier soil, these sunflowers are not only surviving, but cleansing the earth of radioactive heavy metals in a process called phytoremediation. They provide a worthy example of rejecting unhealthy ideals so we can be free to do our best — for ourselves and for our world — with what we have in the moment.

Colleen M. Farrelly

Vidya’s haikai inhabit juxtapositions rooted in science and society, breathing new life into the principle of kire and the collage spirit of haikai. Many of her haiku include unsettling images like

barely open sunflowers on radioactive soil

which conjures a post-apocalyptic regrowth of nature. Her work also infuses references to technology, blending an ancient poetic form with modern imagery, such as:

dark web the gutter mind runs into a reservoir

This imagery perfectly captures modern life online, where one link leads to another and another until one is sucked into a mire of conspiracy theories, pornography, and violence. Her voice echoes this societal juxtaposition of traditional imagery and a life crowded more and more by technology, modern concerns like warfare, and the brevity of a tweet.

Her use of metaphor and conceit also mixes advanced mathematical concepts, such as "Mandelbrot sets" (a type of image created by self-similar, iterative loops of an equation) and wormholes (a theoretical short-cut to travel across space and time by tunneling through space-time structures rather than traveling around them).

Vidya’s techniques themselves hint at this juxtaposition of traditional styles meeting modern styles, including a contrapuntal haikai piece (combining two haiku into a six-line poem that can be read in multiple ways while separating into two proper haiku):

deep sleep
         exhaustion
the regularity
        the long spell
of a pendulum
        of a steel sky

Her haibun also echo a modern poetic style within the structure of traditional haibun, where haiku leaps into a new meaning when combined with prose and title. Her “House Tour” is a lyrical haibun carrying the conceit of body with an old, dusty home. Her “Room 19” haibun executes the traditional haibun structure very well while replacing prose with a free verse poem to evoke a tired mother hoping for respite at a hotel. The monoku ending nearly blends into the free verse piece as a final stanza yet maintains the haikai spirit of kire within the haibun. This balance of tradition with modern times makes her work very relatable while pushing the boundaries of haikai.

Sam Renda

Vidya’s poems tackle some of the most interesting and necessary themes that are possible to explore in haiku: how we move through and engage with the world. The ripples we cause through our action or inaction. The impact of our beliefs and the aftereffects of the choices we make, both individually and as societies.

In her work, we shift gears from deeply personal, intersecting realities, as in:

your trauma a thin layer of guilt around my motherhood

and

tailgating my mother’s history mine

to the broader political and social landscape, with poems like:

not/still in my name

which ask us to grapple with the things we turn a blind eye to versus what we stand for, the things we have and lack capacity to deal with, and the choices we must make about where to expend our energy in protest.

The word choices made throughout this body of work add another intriguing layer. I find myself mulling over why this exact word was chosen, or the deeper meaning of a specific juxtaposition. For example, in the poem:

tolling in crisp white ghosts sunday church bells

the word “ghosts” could so easily have been left out and yet does so much work. Its presence forces the reader’s brain into a kind of electric action—demanding we spend time unpacking the possibilities in a way that’s far more active than a traditional, often gentler, haiku moment. The use of other unexpected terms, like "nihilism" or "Mandlebrot set," has the same effect, asking us to shift our mind-set to accommodate new possibilities for what can or should make its way into haiku.

The result is a collection of work that creatively pushes the boundary of modern haiku in very interesting ways. The only caution I would respectfully offer is that, in places, this approach can start to feel a little too intellectual, and that has the potential to detract from, rather than reinforce, the deep emotional resonance that carries through so many of these poems.

Thank you for reading! We invite you to continue the conversation by hitting the "comment" button below. Feel free to share your favorite poem of Vidya's or your reactions to her work. Vidya and the editors look forward to reading and responding to your comments.

If you liked the issue, we also welcome you to share this with others in your community. Stay tuned for the next issue later in May, which will feature work by Margaret Walker.