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.

A Name Disconnected, A Branch Bare

By Saif Nasr

The name Nasrullah is Arabic for “victory of God.” It has been in my family since the 18th century, forged in the bustling bazaars of Damascus and the ancient valleys of the Levante. It was always worn with pride, like an emerald ring or a diamond necklace. The name is my family’s connection with their Islamic faith and how we are servants of God. However, a harsh climate in an alien land would soon put this beautiful name into harm and threaten its legacy.

My grandfather was Moen Nasrullah, an established lawyer and the most intelligent man I knew. He and his young family fled Damascus, when a coup d’etat broke out, to the haven of Nashville, Tennessee. There, he had my father, Ahmed Nasrullah. My dad would always question my grandfather about why he has such an ethnic name and not something generically American like “Robert” or “John.” My grandfather would explain that in his haste to leave Syria, he could not bring any tangible objects; their name was their only bridge to Islam and Arab culture. As my father got older, he met my mother in St. Louis and they soon got married. During this time tragedy struck the nation: 9/11. These horrific events shocked the nation and threw the United States into a whirlwind. The climate towards Muslim and especially Arab Muslims began to shift and Islamophobia became a common occurrence. My father got many comments like “traitor” or “terrorist” and these began to frighten my parents. Two years later, they had their first child. They gave me an Arab name, Saif, but out of fear of malice towards Muslims, changed my last name to Nasr. Our family name that survived wars, turmoil, colonial occupations, and civil war came to an end on the fateful day of March 11th, 2003.

I grew up oblivious to this change but somewhere deep inside me there was a void. I was too young to understand why I had this void or what I needed to fix it; I could only identify its existence. I obviously recognized that my last name was different, but paid no attention as I thought it was a mere simplification. I never believed that this shortening of five letters would ever compromise my connection to my culture. Or so I thought …

Last summer, my family traveled to my grandmother’s house in Maryland to see how she was holding up amidst the pandemic. After greeting her and hearing the usual “look how tall you have gotten” despite seeing her a month ago, I headed up to the attic. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cardboard box with the Arabic word aa’lia, meaning family. The box didn’t surprise me as much as my ability to read my grandmother’s atrocious Arabic handwriting! I pulled out a large framed manuscript and dusted off the thick cluster of cobwebs. It turned out to be a family tree that dated back to the 1800s. It had a beautiful gold leaf border, dark oak branches, and jet-black text. At the very top was our family’s name, Nasrullah, in a vibrant light blue ink. Seeing the Arabic calligraphy filled me with radiant pride, until I glanced at the bottom left-hand corner. On a tapped piece of paper lay a skinny branch reading Saif Nasr, without my family’s surname. The characters ر ص ن) n, a, s, r) looked deserted, as if they didn’t belong. This was the first moment I felt disconnected with my family and utterly embarrassed. I felt disconnected with their triumphs. I felt disconnected with their struggles. I just felt disconnected.

During the remainder of lockdown, I struggled with this insecurity. There were days spent in my room staring out my window thinking about my name. I understood that it was changed to protect me from violent Islamophobia, but times are slowly changing. I was not going to let a 19-year-old fear dictate who I am today or who I will be tomorrow. I longed to be part of my family’s legacy, so I made a promise to myself that once I turned 18, I would change my name to Nasrullah. I promise to carry on the Nasrullah name and wear it with pride to ensure that my ancestor’s sacrifices were not in vain. I hope to finally take my rightful place on our ancient family tree and read the word Nasrullah in a beautiful Arabic script after my first name.

Someday in the distant future, I want to return to the rocky Syrian shores, look upon its rolling hills, and claim victory over Islamophobia by taking my rightful place in the Nasrullah family.

Saif Nasr is a high school senior living in McLean, VA. He has a passion for personal writing, especially about his Arab heritage. He runs the Arab Student Alliance at his school and loves hearing about each member’s relationship with their culture. In his free time, he likes to read, fish, and stargaze.