These poems by Amal Mathew and Satya Dash have won the 2026 Osmosis Poetry Prize

The Osmosis Poetry Prize was instituted in 2025 by poets Yashasvi Vachhani, Kunjana Parashar, and Kinjal Sethia. The aim of the prize is to celebrate contemporary Indian poets writing in English. It is awarded to two poets, each winning a cash reward of Rs 10,000 and a citation from an external judge. This year, the prize has been won by poets Amal Mathew and Satya Dash. Translator and writer Rohan Chhetri was the external judge this year.

Chhetri said that “Amal Mathew’s poems arrive in dense blocks of prose poetry – troubled, baroque, and voiced by a speaker who is by turns a deconstructed Oedipus, by turns Orpheus. Rooted in both the mythic and the personal, these poems read as lyric explorations towards an elaborate, interconnected personal fable. At times they speak of homecoming, of a hometown but it is the hometown of Juan Rulfo’s Comala in Pedro Páramo, and like all hometowns in literature, it is a ghost town where one must return ‘for the speaking of a lifetime’. The poems themselves seem spoken in the register of an otherworldly voice – one the poet-speaker is only visiting. Polyphonic and ambitious, drawing on art, allegory, and hagiography, they are circuitous and at times maddening, courting contradiction rather than resolving it.”

About Satya Dash, Chhetri said, “[His] poems, built on the structure of the paratactic listicle, brim with a hectic syntax that makes exquisite leaps between eros and elegy. They understand the relation between the sacred and the profane, and how the commerce of beauty is entrenched in the law of the marketplace where ‘confronted/with intimacy, like a sinner’s prayer’ we ‘tremble’. The language is restless; its giddy leaps and torrential image-stacking speak to the purgatorial distraction of our current age, sweeping in everything within its ken – the political, the personal, and the everyday rendered surreal.”

Here are their winning poems:

Amal Mathew

Introduction

For four years I’d had the same dream. I’m lost inside a field of plantains; where the stalks were pressed with the cries of horses struggling to break out of them. I remember that I was making a rigorous lenten Christmas pilgrimage to a mountain-shrine devoted to the mother of God; when I’d de-routed following the sounds of horses in heat. It’d have taken me hours of searching before I discovered that I’d side tracked chasing this mirage into a field where I’d heard the cracks of the flesh of animals – but I couldn’t see a single one at sight. The dream ends with me placing my ears against the stem of a plantain tree as I rage into a murderous fit of heat as I try to listen closely. Afterwards I’m cleaning up against a plantain leaf – when I try to find my way back, I feel good: I only hope mother Mary will be kind enough to lead me backwards. I have been trying, for some hours now – unaware of when I’d woken up to listen for horses in the distance – to justify my continued troubles, sleeping, as I underwent the arresting impression that I was sleeping in my mother’s bed, four years ago, where I mistook her for somebody else and mis-behaved in my sleep. Me and my mother confessed most things to each other. She’d secretly prided that I distinguished the world the way she saw fit – so when I’d mistook her for somebody else that I was sleeping with, it made her colossally distant. She said You’ve grown too much of a man. She exiled me to the TV room of the house called “Unfaithful” (where one couldn’t sleep and accused me of upstaging a mutiny in the family. In turn I resented her and have been half-sleeping ever since) growing smaller and smaller. Wherever I go to bed I wake up at “Unfaithful”. I’m afraid to tell my boyfriend of the way that I’ve been decaying inwards. When I watch him sleep I think that he is flaunting; so I carefully pull his toes with mine and pretend that I didn’t or I wake him up earlier than he asks me to or I always smoke in bed; he says that I don’t look or act my age at times. Claims that I’m growing into a tall child full of riots. If I don’t move back into the ‘Faithful’ part of the house I’m afraid that I will soon regress into a new-born; a single unitary self with his mother; something like a fawn – and no matter whatever I do I wouldn’t grow larger than her world – and no matter whatever I did I would remain a little child. Suppose I were to begin by speaking to her? Confess to her how much I resented her image of me? Begin with implying appreciation, gratefulness; then admit to her that in my head I’ve grown into a mute – forced to an involuntary vow of silence, the word (coward), perhaps is my name. That each violent act of dispossession I’ve directed towards myself reflects a kind of impassioned loyalty to her language – that I wasn’t living to reincarnate her? I’m sure she thinks this – in the hopes of eventually becoming my child because her language deals in terms of resurrection fables. A resurrection fable assumes several violent hierarchies in language that you cannot verify – for instance: Why are you looking among the dead for one who is alive. He is not here: he has been raised. When you allow sets of resurrection fables to play life-government, then you would have sets of (origin & metaphysical) myths. Sets of myths are like a (blanket) lie but more unorthodox in terms of its execution. It creates tremors in memory and genocides of the body. Because more often than not myths are prescribed ‘necessary’ for living societies – I call this the blue print she calls it the holy text – then it evolves into an existential aid or a crutch. A crutch turns into a leg and then the leg turns into a part of the body and the body and the mind and you know, it goes on you forget that it was once violently constructed I suppose that I must begin by speaking to her I suppose that I must visit my mother tomorrow I suppose that I must visit the hometown of my hometowns for the speaking of a lifetime

Illness

It was Giovanni Francesco Barbieri in 1636 – better known as Il Guercino – an Italian baroque painter, who’s oil on canvas titled Saint Augustine meditating on the Trinity that illustrates a medieval account of St Augustine – around the year close to AD 415 St Augustine who was said to have been the bishop of the Hippo Regius (present day Annabe, Algeria) was meditating by a sea-side on the epistemology of the holy trinity when he saw a young boy pacing back and forth between the sea and a hole on the ground. What are you doing St Augustine asked the boy, to which he answered I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole on the ground. That is impossible son St Augustine responded with affection The sea is a wide country that we cannot measure he said. The young boy who seemed disinterested with St Augustine hurriedly paced back and shouted to him If what I’m trying to do is impossible then what you are trying to do is further away from possible. The several variations of this account suggests that the boy disappears after what he has said. I dislike the story and the consequential image because it supposes a hypothetical distance as a pleasurable ailment. This is characteristic to simple stories such as this used to illustrate a moral or often spiritual lesson – a parable. Parables keep score in establishing a made-up distance between two characters of the plot – this method is known as comparison – the Gospel is filled with comparisons such as the lost and found, the mad and civilised, believers and non-believers, refugees and settlers, angels and demons etc. The story of the prodigal son for instance works on this principle: Rich Dad has two sons Light and Dark. Dark requests for his inheritance early and blows the money on alcohol and cheap thrills – consequently he leaves his home, becomes a pauper, works for a pig sty in rags and dreams of eating bean pods given to the pigs when he realises that the indentured workers in his father’s farm earns more money than what his new owner’s family could eat. So he realises the distance from Rich Dad’s mansion – repents, returns to Rich Dad who celebrates the arrival of the lost/dead son by killing the prize calf for dinner, adorning Dark with new shoes, rings and clothes. When Light hears the news of his brother’s return he is furious, Rich Dad confronts Light with moral axiom: My Son, you are always here with me and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be happy because your brother was dead, but now he is alive, he was lost, but now he has been found. This is the story of Light and Dark, the two sons. We say Light and Dark because the story makes use of contrasts to portray distance. A permanent space between two opposing forces. Guercino’s imitation recounts St Augustine’s story in still-life with sound. St Augustine’s black robe which cowers over the brightly naked lad in the same way is concerned with the tensions of constructing differences with Light and Dark strokes – chiaroscuro. Everything else around us is suspended at a moment’s notice just as the saint realises what he has heard; it is as if we – and the onlookers – are let in on the anatomy of this illness; a spontaneous agreement to listen without withdrawing from the oncoming eclipse. When a parable undergoes an aesthetic renovation over a period of decades it evolves into a national allegory. Nonetheless, the distance as a type of contracted condition occurs when a) powerful establishments mobilise the parable and b) when the condition is normalised within story-tellers and listeners. So as to say if you listen to enough parables then you begin to assert that there must be Light and Dark, there must be people in mansions and people in pigsties, there must be the hungry and the well fed because that is the only kind of story that you have heard: the distance invokes difference and the difference invokes hierarchy and the hierarchy invoke language – you realise it was never about salvation but indifference All these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them St Mark 4:10-12. Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew for instance. When you live in a state of constant distance you become a pilgrim. Life becomes an ongoing pilgrimage to evoke differences – you study the large movements of historic migrations shrouded in violence, call it the “Holy Text” and you preach the word of distance. With some refinement of the parable, a story-teller is able to sustain comparisons even after he has stopped speaking. By the time the story-teller rests his lute the audience are sleeping and he enters their mouth from their ears – a silent speaker prompting the listener’s faithful alliance to a voluntary condition of life measured in negative space.

The Perfect Love Story

Deer sinks her teeth into the incapable fawn’s neck – it is themselves, almost as children playing war sounds. Here beneath the blue ghaff as mother’s laps the calf son red poking antler I want to marry you mother. Mother Who? Let me tell us our ecology, please. There was always something so angry and intelligent about the way dear bruised fawn at night. Here’s the thing fawn, you can sit here and tell me you love me or you can run down the hill with your trumpet and let everybody know you don’t love me for my money. So fawn proved his love every night. Thereafter. Shouting for dear in his sleep. Tuning the about-to-explode trumpet. Antlers chipped wall paint where it bled – walls blue turned purple where he smashed his head. Crying for deer to let him inside the house. Fawn cannot imagine after this. Let alone speak – tongue so blue. Fawn wouldn’t make a word yet, notes gasping only. Deer would eventually let him in – acquiesce. Seat fawn down and nurse him. She would hold fawn to her breasts. Fawn would gaze up at dear tears running down his neck – eyes snowing. Fawn would then ask dear, plead his word. Milk? I’d say.

Satya Dash

20s

At a party, I sawed through the neck
of a wine bottle with a blunt knife. I broke
through the facade of the city’s non-existent
night life. I landed in an underground club
with a new hairstyle. I spent the night
with a bartender, reading by the bedside.
At breakfast, the blueberries I was tossed
were shrivelled from mould. At lunch,
pungent slices of jackfruit wouldn’t go
down my throat. Reeking of murder,
the axe that shattered the jackfruit
lay in a corner. Like its blade, my tongue
stained yellow, cursed and spat; in the world
of fast friendships, I high-fived and crashed.
Nasty things were said to beautiful people.
Beautiful people said nasty things. By 3 am,
there wasn’t a single person in any room
who hadn’t said a nasty thing. All of them
arrived beautiful and left with beauty.
I slammed many doors, vowing to never
return. I cleaned many floors, trying
to remember the night before. I didn’t
want to look at things in front of me;
I wanted to think about things far
ahead of me. In the middle of distance,
I was comfortable. Confronted
with intimacy, like a sinner’s prayer,
I trembled. Things gleamed and I
turned to them. Things cracked
when I spoke to them. Both the hour
and day felt alright; it was the passage
of years that hurt my back. After an accident
when I lost most of my front teeth,
what did I do? I couldn’t help checking
my phone for messages; I kept looking
at the door in my hospital room, waiting
to be visited by I don’t know who.

Doing the Dishes

There was an acute awareness of lots
of things happening in the world outside:
the diaphragm lacing the breath of your internal monologue
while words mumbled by a lover echo like an old prayer
like a joke catalysed into breaking news on prime time TV
while a malfunctioning teleprompter gives the invisible away
like stars stippling the sky dry towards darkness
while zillions of animals below pleasure each other’s history
like moments of your life strewn over a field, blurring into one another
while your mind is the boundary made possible by the infinity inside

and amidst all these miracles, here I was on Sunday night,
cleaning the kitchen and doing the dishes, thinking hard:

how I got the area of a circle wrong
in some exam two decades ago,
how coming home from school that day
I heard from the locked bedroom cruel words
of an heated argument between my parents,
how I cupped my ears to the door
until I couldn’t bear to hear more,
how my mother wept on storming out,
how my father’s lip flared and hands shook
as he kicked the scooter which wouldn’t start,
how I went to the drawing room and ramped up
the TV’s volume to realise my fantasy
of its maximal decibel, how I learnt to use sound to drown
voices around me and in my head—

all for the simple shimmer of remembering
I had lured myself into, the tap water now
carrying down the sink elements my mouth couldn’t
consume more of, its gush softening my palms,
a condition of minimal ecstasy reached
when I cannot stave off the temptation
to peel the white crest of skin off my fingertips—

Is it pain? Or is it something surfing
the meadows where animals chance

upon grace? The long feast
of never knowing awaits

my purple knuckles eyeing
a wall in forgiveness.

The Creation of Intention

The moment I kissed a caterpillar’s leaf,
I became a lover of green,
a mass of bones pledging comfort to my brims.
I licked a vein to branch off my tongue,
rivers roaring down throats to form waterfalls.
I ran to the lip of the forest
where books were born. Pissing and dreaming, I lounged
on a stump. Did I catch you grinning

during meditation? Clasped in the roundness
of your grasp, the planet
spun itself into a tsunami. The sea moved the shore
to the center of the city, the cracks
in the chessboard swallowing the pieces.
You winked at me, waves cresting in the oceans
of your pupils.
By then, the water had turned

into a blend of paper, silk and glass. You called it
skin. This fabric you draped around me
laughing off the dirt sewn into the seams.
The earth flat like bread on your forehead, my shadows
pinching your nose. Wild honey
dribbled down your armpits, falling clean
to lace the rims of my mouth. There, drops
crystallised to bear teeth. What was my need

and what was my want? Why did I want to know
what endured beyond either? My instinct
was to bite even while screaming. Air bled water
to soak you in soil; every length of you inside me
began to coil. The green all around turned a shade
redder. Over and over, like a scratched mirror,
I stood between the blood rushing to my hands
and the blood I had on my hands.