The Medley

is a twice-a-year literary journal run by the students of Hansraj College, University of Delhi. It is a repository of stories, poems and essays sent to us from around the world since 2018.

the reckoning

after all is said
	and done, we’re left
	with flotsam and jetsam.
to have devolved
	this much
	was nothing
we reckoned for.
	separately, we’d been 
	intact and got along
swimmingly, each
	with the other, buoyancy
	unimpeded and loss 
of ballast nowhere in the calculation
	but a reckoning,
	unexpected, uninvited
found its way
	to our respective hatches
	and we were at its mercy.
of a sudden, we had neither
	hope nor wish
	for reconciliation or truce.
we’re long dispersed,
	detritus excreted in our wake,
	and have surrendered
the present tense,
	in favor of ancient
	unchanging history,
good for nothing but sifting
	through for, at best,
	the remnant of better days.

    

Philip Wexler

Philip Wexler lives in Bethesda, Maryland and is retired after a long career at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Over 210 of his poems have appeared in magazines. His poetry books include The Sad Parade (prose poems), and The Burning Moustache, both published by Adelaide Books, The Lesser Light by Finishing Line Press, With Something Like Hope (Silver Bow Publishing) and I Would be the Purple (Kelsay Books), the latter 3 all published in 2022. He also organizes and hosts Words out Loud, a monthly spoken word series convened at the Compass Arts Center in Kensington, Maryland.