“Where did your Malaysian accent go?” A close friend asked me after I came back from my first year at university. We were sitting at a café with sleek glass windows in Kuala Lumpur. “Give me a few days, it’ll come back.” Till then, he had to deal with speaking to a foreigner …
Paris-based artist Sandra Paris shares the surrealist collages that pulled her out of a major creative rut: “I love collage, to cut, paste, cut, paste…. it brings me back to my childhood. I love to associate and connect things that would never go together to create a dreamlike and poetic atmosphere in my collages.”
(my ex
still has my copy
of borderlands
i still have her copy
of beloved)
bodies froth
at the mouth
of mina zayed, oozing
sun
അമ്മ (Amma)
My Amma’s Malayalam is Trivandrum slang,
shifting between simple
churidar and formal sari in a blink.
my head’s not in the clouds it’s in second hand smoke rumbling the remains of a mute blast of a bomb i do not recall
i fell into birth
licked down like
sand tongue, salivating
water toeing
against continent; i got me
a country this way
The lights are off. The class stands together against the corner of the room closest to the door. One student wonders whether black paper would really fool a shooter …
Three new haikus, carrying surprising water motifs, reflect on our quotidian lives.
Adella wondered if it was getting bad again. She had read a poem recently that called identity a “wet shirt” you had to pull over your head every morning.
I lost the metaphor
along with some luggage
that I never carried
and children
I was never meant to bear
I was on my way to visit my grandmother in Pasuruan, a five-hour bus ride from my tiny hometown Caruban. Every school break, my mother and I spent a few days in the countryside. My father took us to the square, dropped us off at the gate, and reminded me, while my mother was busy buying snacks and water for the ride, to protect her and myself on the bus…
recorded as an overdose
all my fingernails were pulled out of
my body …
Sit still enough and your demons will find you,
Keep your shadow moving else they shelter in your shade,
Avoiding the shine of the sun else they burst into flames…
A summer Saturday night at 926 Bar & Grill was the first night I laid eyes on you.
I was sipping a whiskey sour
As you sat there bald and baby-faced watching Futurama on the HD TV…
