frothy caverns of moss / setting up strawberry runners / my hair will smell of soft yellow mangoes / the colour of goldfish at dawn / people always look at my letters and ask me if they’re poetry / you always said you were never your mama’s daughter / so I dived a cannonball straight into the water / I ate a treacle tart sitting in the sea / and dug my toes into the womb of buckled sand / and watched the scarlet lobsters bridge the gaps between my thighs / I am a flash between space and summer psychotic echo between sea and land / I am butternut squash and sticky apple kisses and the third flight down the staircase urging you to jump / watch my hair flush to a marigold / and my palms wrinkle to the colour of silly orange apricots / how I can laugh knowing I’m fuller than ever / but she’s a dry cry from before you were born / and the gulls plait their way into my hair and you’re sadder than ever knowing she’s gone / you could never quite catch the feeling of being born / but maybe now you can imagine being born / maybe you can borrow happiness / lying here / a messy state of things / cradling the azure sunlight in the strange breath of your palms
Nabiha is a seventeen-year-old writer who enjoys writing stories she knows she’ll never finish. She has previously been published in the Blue Marble Review, was shortlisted for the national BBC Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University and the Young Muslim Writers’ Award, has won the Kingston Quakers’ Poetry Competition, and the 2022 Solstice Prize for Young Writers; has recently been published in Paper Lanterns Literary Journal, and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, — and is also a Foyle Young Poet.