Issue 22

Minnows

By Samuel Adeyemi

I used to have this dream where my father tosses us
into the ocean’s blue belly, & when we try to scream,
we would only scream water—language as bubbles
floating out from our mouths. Of course, it is nothing
but an outcome of worry. I am still the first child of
a marriage waltzing on the nape of a precipice, & like
some broken souvenir, my mother still keeps the
cursed family name. They still sit beside each other
in church while every God I know dies in my throat.
Swear to me you will not let either of them touch this
poem. Once, they tried to pray my worry away, built
a chapel in my room, used my pillows as cymbals.
& while they uttered each prayer, I refused to permit
the holy words, refused to amen my soft exorcism.
It is not cleansing but love I desire. Husband, take
your wife & flower a kiss upon her head. Wife, take
your husband & pluck out the sorrow from his lip.

Samuel A. Adeyemi is a young writer from Nigeria. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, 580 Split, The Maine Review, Leavings Lit Mag, Kissing Dynamite, The Shore, Jalada, and elsewhere. When he is not writing, he enjoys watching anime and listening to a variety of music. You may reach him on Twitter and Instagram @samuelpoetry

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?

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.

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.

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.

The Fire

By Avery Sauber

It was a Thursday night and outside was the coziest thunderstorm. Perched where the great woods met a cliff overlooking an ocean was an old house, taller than it was wide. Sitting inside this house, a woman, in her favorite wingback chair, enjoying the comfy storm. Unlike most in her current situation, she wasn’t reading, or listening to music, or doing anything particularly entertaining. She was simply sitting, staring at her crackling fire and thinking. Of what she was thinking we may never know, but one could almost be certain she was thinking. The house was dark–it always was this time of night–but the storm had cut what little electricity the old house had. But she had lit a candle, and that was all she needed. The thunder boomed.

She was staring; you couldn’t verify if she was thinking, but one look would confirm that she was very much staring. At one point it seemed that she was staring so hard she forgot exactly what she was staring at, for in the blink of an eye she realized that she was not in her chair by the fire, but in the hallway upstairs. Looking at a wall. She wondered how she had found herself in this predicament–she didn’t remember moving at all, and even if she had, why had she gone here? As she turned her head, she heard a child’s laugh coming from the bedroom door. Strange, her daughter had grown up and moved out long ago. She went back to her chair.

As she sat in her chair she heard crackling, the crackling of a radio tuned to a channel with no signal. A voice cleared the crackles, and the old sound of a 1920s vocalist flooded the room. The woman by now was most likely deep in thought, perhaps she was thinking of how strange it is that a radio with no source of power that has not worked for 6 years would suddenly turn on. But it was a lovely tune, so she stayed put. Or perhaps, she was thinking about a child’s laugh coming from an empty room. Or maybe not.

She was sitting, staring, and listening–listening to the rain and the song. She closed her eyes and listened, listened until she heard a new sound: water. She opened her eyes to find she was no longer in her chair–she was sitting on the edge of her bed. She sat staring, not at a fire, but rather out of an ocean-view window. Yet the water she was hearing was not the ocean, it was the sound of the sink in her bathroom, the sink with the spout that never turned on. She was glad that it was finally working. She walked back downstairs.

When she sat back in her chair she could see the fire, and through a window she could see the ocean. Through that same window, she could also see the light falling of snow. It’s on cold winter nights that one loves to sit by the fire and think; although for the woman it was getting increasingly hard to think, with the radio and the fire, not to mention the buzzing and flickering of the table lamp’s bulb. She considered turning off the lamp but decided she needed the light. As the musical stylings of 20s swing faded into 40s jazz, she decided that she needed something to drink. She walked across the room and grabbed a mug out of the cupboard. The particular mug she grabbed was found at the very back of the cupboard and read “World’s Best Dad” on the front; it was the only one clean. She rinsed out the dust and made some hot chocolate. She sat back down and relaxed into the music. During one song a noise piqued her ears. It was the sound of a bell, the kind you would put on a house cat. It sounded identical to the one she had put on her old pet. After a rather loud meow, she felt her cat walk across her feet and settle on the chair beside her. Anyone else in this moment might have been perplexed: why, after 24 years of being missing, had her cat finally come back? I suppose she was just happy her cat had returned.

She sat listening to the radio, the ocean waves, and Edith the cat purring softly in her sleep. After finishing her drink, she returned to her staring, the light of the fire consuming her attention. As she stared, she felt a gust of wind brush her cheek. She was standing at the edge of the cliff and looking at the water. This was not unusual, although she usually enjoyed being here when the weather was nice. Tonight was very foggy with a slight breeze–not ideal conditions if you are looking to view anything. Light wasn’t an issue, not even in the dead of night; the moon shines so brightly here it could pass for a second sun. But due to the fog, the only thing she could see was the gleam of a lighthouse on a distant shore. Until the ray from the lighthouse went out. Now tell me why, in the middle of the night, when the earth was nothing but fog, did a lighthouse go out? Conceivably, the only notion she held at the moment was that she now had to go back inside.

She turned and started to wander towards her house. About halfway there, an intense beam of light engulfed her sight. The beam came from the woods and stayed on her for a second or an hour, or what could have been any amount of time, then disappeared. She lightly shook her head in an attempt to clear the floaters from her eyes and walked to the front door. As she was walking, she hoped that whoever was holding that flashlight escaped the foggy woods and got home safely. But she wasn’t too worried, after all, Edith made it back. When she had settled back into her chair, she listened to Edith’s bell slowly make its way down the stairs and into her lap.

She got lost in thought for a little while, but when she returned, she determined that not too much time had passed; it certainly wasn’t morning, and the hailstorm was still going as strong as it was in the late evening. Her cat had moved back to her separate chair and fallen asleep. At some point, the radio had stopped playing tunes and reduced itself back to crackling, and the old lamp bulb had finally given out. The one thing that grasped her consciousness most urgently was the fire, which had gone out. The house was nothing but a pit of darkness, light coming only from the moon. She was paralyzed with fear, her mind consumed with the sound of hail striking the walls, a broken radio crackling, and a dead cat purring. And then she heard it: a pounding. This wasn’t hail, this was the front door. And as she slowly turned around to face the door, it happened. She finally stopped thinking.

Avery Sauber is an eighth-grade student at Centennial Middle School in Minnesota. When she’s not doing schoolwork, she can often be found playing lacrosse, taking naps, or updating her personal book index -complete with title, page number, and publication date. She hopes to continue with her writing pursuits in the future.