Poetry
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This Morning
I went for taro, custard, and red bean buns. Shrieks above from an argument broke my somnolence; a gull defended the cross it perched on from a circling raven’s assault. The vanquished raven landed and sulked. Do I call it augury, score a win for yang, or remember Jeffers, who wrote, “it is bitter…
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Luggage Fee
Pre-Partition luggage tag for the ancestral round-trip Attendant sees my belly and lets me board early with the still-complete families Lahore traffic clouds my open eyes, the only part of me that can pass When storm-windowed shut, they only dream in American and only got here by exhausting the question: How much of Daughter’s climate…
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The Things You See
These are the things you see yet I remember: first, the animals in cages too small, littered with empty strawberry soda cans; then, the yellow cocoon of a puttering bus to Aden, …
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Who’s Counting
Written by: Rachael Scarborough Who’s Counting by Rachael Scarborough (poetry, accessible version)
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Un Puño de Tierra
Acostumbrada está mi cuerpa de mujer a las muchas vejaciones, tantas ha sentido en cada uno de los días. Hoy amanecí en un tiradero. Mucho le pedí a él que la vida me dejara, tengo familia voy a la escuela me esperan en el trabajo, solo iba al cine y por un helado mis amigas…
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Prepping
where i’m from there’s a lake full of gold which is also a pond full of people & my pops my old man has taken to buying gold because it’s that or cryptocurrency that will be salvaged in the flood & people drowned in that pond men who never learned to swim striking out like…
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Abdication
At first I think of postage stamps and the faces of queens, immortalized in their black-and-white moment. The shades of the past are monochrome, marred only by some accidental fold, some streak of pale lightning. Pink roses blooming on the wallpaper of my bedside dresser. When I take this photo between my thumb and forefinger,…
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Colliery
At the MoMA there is a series of photos, black and white, Bernd and Hilla Becher who captured old steel mills, toppled tipples now destitute. My heart is a braitch hole, once full now excised of any valuables, cavernous drop through earth. Fingers pick me over, break away the slate from the good coal. Uniform…
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Make Your Visit
Evening signs a tremendous breath against the groaning weight of this city. Day away to rest, with its falling rays catching sliding on arms straining beneath rolled shirt sleeves, fishers back from dock leaning out windows butt-ends clenched between teeth, curling tobacco rosettes against flushed sky. Falling light dusts long heads of those impatient in…
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Mother of Pearl Rosary
My brother Herbert and sister Luisa laughing Sitting and swinging on a church gate A black robed priest, wearing a crucifix, swearing at them, to get down Confirmation day, white dresses Wearing a white carnations corsage my mother had given me No indication of oncoming storms on that sunny May day No indication of how…
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