Melanie Lau, Author at Blue Marble Review

Ode to Anxiety

By Melanie Lau

ode to the dust bunnies on the bathroom tile / the
bleached toilet seat / the white lights / the warm water
setting of the shower faucet / steam drifting through the
rungs of the curtain / the sting of feeling on frozen hands

ode to the clothes on the floor / unmade bed / catch of a
sweaty duvet against sticky skin / naked body wasting /
waiting for the evening to end / sinking into the ground /
wet hair rotting in a tea towel / burial tease

ode to the spiral in a small room / tremors / chattering
teeth / the storm in the calm / how the dark is deadly / the
sanity is throttled / the throat closes up / and the night
burns / can’t get enough breath / gasping for safety

ode to the something bad that might happen / the
something bad that might happen right now / the
something bad that might happen to me right now / the
something bad that is me right now / the bad / the me

Melanie Lau is a writer from Honolulu, Hawaii. She focuses on fiction, with a love for magical realism and low fantasy, but she dabbles in nonfiction and poetry too. She is currently pursuing a BFA in creative writing at Emerson College.

First Born

By Divya Mehrish

There is a folded photograph on the vanity and a daisy
tucked above my right ear and I’m waiting for the woman

who birthed me to claim my childhood in unfiltered
motherness. In my mouth, her embrace tastes like a shot

of raw apple cider vinegar—sour and hollow with a touch
of sweet. I know that it’s good for the body, but it burns

the throat as it goes down. My mother’s hot love has never
been motherly. Her voice is loose and her lids are heavy

and her dreams are steely-eyed. All I want is an angel
to drape a shield of tongued sleep over my flat chest

and shower me with golden kisses and golden light.
All I want is to be lulled to sleep by a prayer sung

like a summer breeze across parched lips. All I want
is to learn how to mother a life too young to adore

anyone but the creature who nursed it. All I want
is to learn how to love and how to be loved. Mama,

I’ve been waiting for you to fall in love with my eyes
and my body and my voice since the day I watched

your uterus convulse into my baby brother’s existence.
Ravenous for a man’s protection, your lips immediately

imprinted on his sickly yellow skin. That drab morning,
you produced the child who would one day let you be

a child again. Mama, I’m sorry I am a daughter. Mama,
I’m sorry I am you, but motherless. Mama, I’m sorry

I have nothing to offer you save my thin frame and a pair
of swollen breasts that pound each other in the wind

like the fists of a big sister jealous of her infant brother.
Mama, I want you to know that I love your son despite

the fact his existence negates everything I am worth. Mama,
for eighteen years, I’ve been waiting for you to choose me

and place me, gently, into your curated museum of prized
possessions. Mama, let me be peaceful in your arms. Mama,

tell me everything will be okay. Mama, tell me you wanted
me to be born. Mama, please just tell me that I am enough.

Divya Mehrish is a writer and student at Stanford University. Her work has been recognized by the National Poetry Competition, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, the Scholastic Writing Awards, and the Columbia College Chicago’s Young Authors Writing Competition. Her writing appears in Sojourners, PANK, Coastal Shelf, Prairie Margins, Broken Pencil, Roadrunner Review, Ricochet Review, Polyphony Lit, Tulane Review, and Amtrak’s magazine The National, among others.

Start Line Standards

By Charlotte Moon

Ticking through seconds
the clock mocks
my mind grinding past duds,
discarding one good idea after another.

Pens scratch.
Keys clack.
Pages Flip,
filling with compelling sufficiencies.

The girl across from me is writing
too much. I glare at her.
Label her a suck up to ease my mind.
I bet it’s bad whatever she’s writing.

I’m a thinker.
I’m busy.
I’m sleep-deprived.
Inspiration hasn’t struck.

The second-hand screams,
reminding me of extra-long blocks
two hours
before I can escape into the safety
of other priorities.

I shift, uncomfortable, forced to sit and examine my shortcomings.

Mediocrity and bad work habits
a poem due
about yesterday
I’m scared

to tarnish a perfect mark
even a perfect zero over zero

Why did I write better poems last year
when all I’ve got now are scribbles?
How did I play harder piano pieces
when I was nine than I do now?
When did I get so damn scared of failure?
Why do I care so much?
So set on perfection I can’t commit

and here I sit.
Writing about my feelings.
Pathetic.

What I need is an idea.
An ok idea.
Any idea.
Why can’t I—

Charlotte Moon is a Vancouver based writer who has published fiction in the Tricities News. She enjoys the seasons, making music, and the rush of adrenaline induced from being chased by Canadian wildlife.

God in Summertime*

By Haniya Shariq Khan

In the afternoon time becomes
the oil dripping off flatbread fresh
from the stove in my childhood home.
We don’t have language for those fifteen minutes between
the muezzin’s exhales. All we have is
the phlegm rattling in his throat and the verse:
Say, God is one, God is refuge.
Repeat it to the black stone
in the land of your prophet.

For a long time, it used to be full of idols, that stone,
back when the Arabs worshiped the Three Daughters
but you won’t find their names anywhere these days.
If I were a black stone, who would I have carried?
Yes, I see the idols now: stupid little girls made of stacked pebbles.
Which apostle will come to knock you down, child?

Say, God is death, God is rebirth.
O teenage bloodstain,
You teeter between saint and sinner,
This world and the next.
Which pagan will come to put you back together, o pile of stones?

Haniya Shariq Khan is fifteen years old and lives in Lahore, Pakistan. In her spare time, she likes writing stories nobody will ever read, doing macrame, and practicing her embroidery.

*The poem is mostly about the death of the old self and religion is my metaphor of choice. It takes a lot of inspiration from my Muslim roots and my fascination with pre-Islamic Arabia. In the religion of pre-Islamic Arabia, the Three Daughters were the goddesses Al-Manat, Al-Lat, and Al-‘Uzza, daughters of the chief god, Hubal. They, along with the rest of the pantheon, were worshipped at the Kaaba (which is also referred to in the Qur’an as the black stone), which is something that’s always struck me as ironic because the Kaaba is considered the holiest place in the world for Muslims but it once housed the gods of another people. So, I use the Kaaba as an allegory for change — maybe someday it’ll be ironic that I was this way, because I’ll be completely different in the future.

The stacked pebbles are a reference to the way some historians believe indigenous Arabian idols may have looked. Some were apparently represented by circles of raised stone, others were carved out of a singular slab, and others still as cairns. I was pretty fascinated by the idea of cairns, since in theory you could just go and knock it down, but pure faith prevents you from doing so. When I refer to myself as carrying idols made of stacked pebbles, I’m talking about how flimsy my beliefs are, how easily you could collapse them. The apostle coming to knock them down is a reference to the way thousands of idols were destroyed with the rise of Islam and its prophet (PBUH). So, who’s going to come and change my outlook on life?

Abeyance

By Aileen Xie

What is it like to be suspended in time, motionless, uncertain of what to do next, of how to carry forward? When the world seems to go against our preconceptions and we are lost, either dwelling over the guilt and regret of the past or the fear of the future, we default to a state of psychological and even physical abeyance. But the world does not wait for us to catch up – time continues to move forward, for that is its nature, and you can choose to either wither away with it or navigate alongside it.

Aileen Xie is an artist and creative writer in high school, based in the California Bay Area. Much of her work explores the intricacies of human nature, including guilt, ambivalence, and contradiction. When she’s not drawing or writing, she’s reading some classic literature with music playing in the background and a cup of coffee in her hand.

The Liar’s Game

By Sophie Sheumaker

It begins like this:

You are thirteen. Four girls sit around you at the lunch table. Their lips shimmer with layers of gloss, the air around them is thick with the smell of vanilla perfume. They talk about boys and you think about how their lips shine.

There’s a game they play called boy crazy. They tell you that if they tickle your leg and you laugh it means you’re boy crazy. One of them runs her fingers over the top of your thigh, laughing, and you feel the hot burn of blood rushing to your face. You laugh but you don’t think it means what they think it means. You don’t know what to think.

There’s one girl. Her hair is curly and her eyes are brown- she says they’re brown like mud but you think they’re brown like chocolate- and she looks at you. Asks you which boy you like. The answer is clear, it’s there, it’s burning holes in the pit of your stomach. No one, you want to tell her, I don’t like any boys. Something inside you says she won’t like that. They won’t like that.

So, you say your first lie- your first lie that really matters. And the game begins.

There’s a boy on the football team. He’s tall and blond and he’s not quite handsome yet, but he will be. Everyone can tell he will be. The girls all know it; they talk and talk and talk about him and you know that if he’s the one you pick, they won’t think anything is wrong with you.

When she asks you who you like, it’s his name that you give her.

You’re fifteen and summer’s changed everyone, changed everything. The brown eyed girl’s got legs that stretch for days and days and days. Everyone stares at her. They can’t help it. She tells you about how she wants that football player, the almost handsome one, to look at her.

She asks you if you think they’d be good together and you tell her yes. You tell her they’d be great together.

It’s another lie, but she can’t know that.

You watch as it happens, as she bats her lashes and he takes her to the movies, to dinner with his parents, to nights out in his car. You see them kissing against her locker and you feel something rise in you. You feel like you’re going to be sick, but you push it down. Deep, deep down. You tell yourself it’s nothing.

You still haven’t had your first kiss by the time you turn sixteen. The other girls tease you. They smack their glossy lips and they tell you how pretty you are, how smart you are, how you could have any boy in the school if you only tried. They don’t understand, but you’re starting to. You’re really starting to.

Boys ask and ask and ask you out and you always say no. You’re not ready. You’re the kind of person that dates in college, not high school. You have homework, you’re too busy, you don’t need the hassle of it all.

You’re the worst kind of liar because you lie to yourself.

The brown-eyed girl wants you to be happy the way she’s happy. She talks to her football player boyfriend and gets you the number of one of his friends, the quiet, dark haired one who’s always looking at you. Please, she says, please please go. You’re perfect for each other.

You’ve gotten close to her since middle school. She seems so excited, she wants you to go so bad, you don’t want to disappoint her.

So you say yes.

You’re starting to figure out that you don’t know how to say no to her.

There’s a movie showing at the theater near your house. When you go to see it, he leaves his hand open on the armrest. For the first half of the movie, you watch his hand lay there waiting for you. But for the second half, you reach out and you hold it.

It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s fine, you tell yourself. It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine.

Afterwards, he parks his truck in the middle school parking lot. The town stretches out in front you, shining. Burning. It’s practically on fire. He’s looking at you and you don’t want to look back at him, but it’s what you’re supposed to do. His eyes are so very green.

There are no butterflies when he kisses you. No magic. No fireworks. But it isn’t bad. It’s not horrible. It’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s nothing. There are lips against lips and nothing more.

Later, she sits on your bed, wet nail polish shining on her fingernails, and she asks you how it went. You think about telling the truth, but it catches in your throat. Great, you tell her. It was great.

He tells you he loves you three months later and you tell him that you love him too. It’s not a lie, you tell yourself, because you do love him. You love the way he laughs at all your jokes, the way he reads every book you recommend to him, the way he always wants to stay up late talking to you. You can’t help but love him.

But at some point, you have to admit to yourself that it’s not the same. Maybe you love him, but he’s in love with you. He’s seventeen and he’s fallen in love for the very first time and you’ve broken his heart before he’s even realized it.

She calls you crying at three in the morning. You put on your jacket, you go to her house, you knock on her window like you’ve done a thousand times before. She pulls you into her bed and you hold her until she tells you what’s wrong.

It’s the football player. Because of course, it’s always the football player. He’s decided he just can’t love her anymore. You try and try and try to wrap your mind around something like that, but you can’t. It doesn’t make sense, not loving her.

You get her to stop crying. You get her to start laughing. You’re good at that. You’ve always been good at knowing just the right things to get her to smile. She holds your hand while she falls asleep and you think, just for a moment, of how nice it feels.

He cries when you break up with him and even though you thought you wouldn’t, you cry too. You cry because you wanted it to work so, so badly. Because you’ve been lying to him and to yourself and to everyone else and for what? You couldn’t make it work. You couldn’t make it feel right.

She crawls through your window. She holds your hand. She tells you about all those fish in the sea. The two of you are going to go off to college and find someone right. The right boy.

You don’t know what to say. Or maybe you do and you just don’t know how to say it.

You’re eighteen when you have to face the truth. College is so close you can touch it and you’re running out of time.

She hasn’t dated anyone since the football player. Instead, she spends all her time with you. She reads all the books you recommend to her. You take her to the movies, throwing popcorn at the screen. She stays up late every night talking to you.

You think of the way your name sounds in her mouth.

You’re alone with her in her car the night before you leave for college. You’ve been talking and talking and talking about everything and nothing and you’re so tired of not telling her the truth. She looks at you and you look at her. You say her name.

There must be something about the way you say it, because her face changes. Her eyes soften, her lips part just the smallest bit. She says your name too.

This is the moment.

You can feel it in the air, in the silence that stretches out for miles in between the two of you. It is hot and heavy and endless and for the first time you think maybe.

Maybe you can tell the truth.

Maybe, just maybe, she’ll love you the way you love her.

You’re drowning in her brown eyes and you have a choice to make. You’ve been playing this game for a long time and you don’t know if it’s a game that you can win. You just want to make her smile. You just want to hold her hand and have her hold yours back. But to do it, you have to make a choice.

The only way to win the game is to end it.

So you do.

Sophie Sheumaker is a twenty-year-old aspiring writer from Colorado. She’s currently a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. When she’s not writing, she’s helping edit papers and working for Emerson’s resident publishing club.