Aditya Tiwari is one of modern India’s leading gay poets. His first collection of poems, April is Lush, was published in 2019 and garnered international recognition, followed by the anthology Over the Rainbow: India’s Queer Heroes in 2023, released during India’s historic marriage equality hearings to critical acclaim. The book was named one of The Hindu’s Books of the Week and featured by The Indian Express as a top Pride Month read. The Hindu called it “lucidly written,” while Hindustan Times praised it as a “chronicler of India’s queer history and activism.”
Aditya holds an MA in Broadcast & Digital Journalism from the University of East Anglia. His work and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, BBC Radio 4, VICE, ELLE, PinkNews, The Telegraph, The Times of India, The Alipore Post, The Wire, and elsewhere. He has been a TEDx speaker, a BBC producer, and a recipient of fellowships from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Goethe-Institut in partnership with Deutsche Welle (DW), the Youth Economic Forum, and the Humsafar Trust in collaboration with the British High Commission. He was featured as one of GQ’s influential poets, Outlook’s 75 Changemakers of Modern India, and Cosmopolitan’s Ones to Watch.
His third poetry collection, All That’s Left Behind, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster India in 2026. You can follow him on Instagram and X at @aprilislush.
Terrarium
My lover, a dying leaf of winter—
Many, many winters ago,
he was mine, and I was his.
In dreams sometimes,
we meet, and he’s mine.
In dreams sometimes,
we meet, and he’s crying.
In my dream,
a stale shroud
cloaks his neck
and plunges him
into the darkness—
into the blue,
he goes…
The sky darkens
to a faint violet
in mild September.
They tell me
this town stretches
from the dull-grey house
to a luminous blue river.
How do I tell them
that it’s no bigger
than the breadth
of my palm.
Afraid to live without him,
I bathe in ritual smoke:
chest-crushing heat, smoky wisps,
curl up like genesis.
I lay my naked body
on a funeral pyre,
like mist resting
on the vale of drifted snow.
The night lamp blazes off,
and I thrive in the dark.
They say promises
whisper like prayers—
I’m too weak
to keep them.
At last–
all life passes,
and between the
grey-blue horizon,
I turn slowly from
night to day.
Self-burial at Dawn
Under dawn’s gossamer veil,
at the sound of Azan, they call for prayer.
Men kneel in devotion, while I yearn for a face—
one I cannot name. Through the window,
dawnlight froths over the sill.
A hawker’s guttural cry scrapes against silence,
while the stale breath of fags clings
like an unshakable ghost. Somewhere, a wolf howls,
cracking open a forgotten wound.
A black tide of crows splinters the sky.
The graveyard, tight-lipped as a mourner’s jaw,
sits waiting. After withering winter
takes another turn, wisdom cries
from the jagged edge of a season,
turning away, as if in retreat.
And last month, on the last day,
cocoa birds stitched ceremonials—
a dirge for the nameless,
buried beneath the heaving chest
of dawn.
What My Neighbor Left Behind
The Day That She Died
The day that she died, she left behind
four dead flowers in a vase, two fresh newspapers,
an old television, a refrigerator,
pearl necklaces, a box of gold bangles,
perfume bottles, a pack of Virginia Slims,
yesterday’s shadow, her smile,
the absence—like a song in the rain.
What she left behind was only enough to fill
the empty rooms in her abandoned house.
If we were to go back
to the way we used to be,
and everything we’ve lost
all our lives were to return,
our faces would be bright-lit
across a long river.
Each day, squeezed
into a grain, a petal.
Each memory, into nothing,
nothing but dust.
Remember, the mouth
of the open river without
the rain is a blue prayer,
breathless on a stranger’s face.
We Named the Stars After Our Wounds
We
lay on your rooftop
with the city snoring below—
that bright one,
the day Section 377 died.
You
traced Orion
on my arm like
a promise no country
could break.
I
named a faint one
for you—
and waited
for it to fall.