The Fairy Tale Magazine is gorgeously designed and put together. They do themes and the one that I submitted to is called Wild Wood, and it talks about tales linked to trees across cultures, including Yakshas and Yakshis. The poem I submitted was written two years ago, and I had been repeatedly trying to find a home for it, accumulating rejections in the process. To my delight, it got accepted by this magazine. In this poem, I’ve combined Kashi and Yakshas. It goes back to the founding legend of Kashi, where a lying Ketaki flower talks about how Brahma saw the top of Vishwanath aka Shiva.

I was trying to write the poem shaped like a tree. Happily for me, they formatted this poem so it is shaped like a tree.

Published in the Wildwood issue of The Fairy Tale Magazine, on April 15, 2026

Dancing Over Mycelium

Dancing over mycelium

         the dwarf

            Kubera

         yaksha king

                   lotus leaf skin

                 ravenous big belly

           sheltered under a majestic

                     banyan

           tree

         awaiting

                      sesame

                       ghee

                        rice

          offering

that would move him

   from yaksha-land to ancestor-land

sweat from his eyes dripped into mycelium that

     bubbled through millennia of earth

    swirling up a dust cloud that settled on a

naked rishi sitting cross-legged in meditation

   unmoving even to the termites building their

              mound around him

the rishi watched from within

     beady eyes awaiting the moment

    when he could catapult over the kala-chakra

and attain immortality or at least less toxicity

the dust-cloud / termite-mound / yaksha-sweat / congealed

 into an emerald that gleamed under the banyan canopy

  hacked by terrorists in mismatched boots

    causing its tall proud erection to collapse

     into rag-bone string-hoppers

from its vertiginous heights

descended a deceitful Ketaki flower

that lied to the gods about how fire was born

causing it to be banished into the

netherworld rubble of howling skulls

upon which danced Kubera the dwarf

fickle was he / this yaksha king / who could hang from trees

tease unmoving saints / await ascension / descend to the land of the snakes

      to dance on lying flower skulls

Published in the Wildwood issue of The Fairy Tale Magazine, on April 15, 2026

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