Editor’s Letter

Dear Reader,

Every act of creation comes with its hopes, its fears, its attendant ambivalence, ever tipping the balance between progress and protraction. It is loaded with effort, replete with possibility; a promise of fulfilment for the resolute feat. More often than not, the attempt is preceded with silence. A quiet that narrows the focus, a moment to gather your composure. It is not without much pause that we can proceed.

Sometimes, however, that silence extends into stasis. Sometimes, the stasis drags. Sometimes, the drag fortifies itself, but only to resist motion before nullifying its own effort. Neither wanting nor waiting, the principle holds true: a body can “persevere in its state of being at rest”, except insofar as it is made “to change its state by forces impressed” — and even then.

In these pieces, we dwell within the ennui so unfamiliar to our unending pace of coming and going. Here, we sit outside entropy’s rhythm of syncopated dispersion — and then find in inertia some stability, at least for the moment.

Love,
Nicole

Ridwanullah Sakariyah

First Law

A body at rest, the teacher said,
will remain at rest
unless compelled otherwise.

I wrote it down without knowing
that grief obeys the same equation.

After my mother died,
the house did not rearrange itself.
Curtains hung.
Plates remained stacked.
Her slippers waited
with the patience of abandoned punctuation.

Relatives arrived like applied force,
pressing advice into our palms.
Move on.
Be strong.
Time heals.

But the air resisted.

Even dust understood loyalty,
settling each afternoon
on the arm of her favourite chair.

It took months for the kettle
to forget the exact angle of her hand.
Inertia is not laziness.
It is matter remembering its shape.

When I finally carried her clothes
to the back of the wardrobe,
the hangers swayed long after I stopped touching them.

Something had been compelled.
Something had moved.

The house has not forgiven me.

Aalok Thakkar

Two Poems on Inertia

I

The mattress takes the burden of my hip,
I seem to have forgotten how to move.
The years have dried the words upon my lip;
I live inside a fact I cannot prove.

No hand arrives to break the waiting air,
No charge to wake the silence in my skin.
I am a drought no season comes to bear,
A hollow pulling all the hollow in.

By law, a touch alone can shift the weight,
For nothing moves unless a force is laid.
The silence is a wire drawn tight and straight,
A pleading ache that I cannot evade.

No warmth has crossed this room for years,
Inertia turns to bitter salt and tears.


II

I marked this heavy stone last year,
When winter skies were cold and clear,
This season too it holds the ground,
Without a tremor or a sound.

It lacks the will to rise and go,
Or shake away the drifting snow.
It only waits for some intent—
A sudden hand, an accident.

But no one walks the lonely crest,
To put its stillness to the test.
And so it keeps the law of rest:
Untouched, untroubled, and unpressed.

Julia Biggs

Waiting I & II

Stuart Cavet

Not Getting Hysterical

Do I want to see it, the doctor asks, and mistaking stoic indifference for casual acceptance shows it to me anyway. It vaguely resembles a spark plug, only it’s made of muscle and connective tissue (my muscle, my connective tissue); and instead of being black with engine grime, it’s pink with still-congealing blood and other bodily fluids (all mine, too, of course). He holds it in a glass case as if it’s a museum piece, one of a kind; and it is, in fact, unique and irreplaceable. I’m like an obsolete model for whom the manufacturer has long since stopped making spares.

I look away. The machines to which I’m wired flash amber and red like a dashboard all frantically lit up. I doubt the verbal assurances that I’m still roadworthy. The machines don’t lie. To me they warn that I’m low on gas and out of oil, that my wheels are out of balance, that my brakes are worn, and that all my moving parts are seized with rust and my engine, now missing a vital component, refuses to fire. 

I can’t help concluding I’m uninsurable, a death-trap and worth more as scrap.

Henry Opeyemi

The Poem, The Blood, and The Flower

the poem: to live a life of colours, is to witness the redness 
                      of blood, both hands full of grace, blessed with 
                      unfaithfulness. I am reading to you by the flames in
                      candlelights, the children in gaza are open graveyards 
                      and I am not poetic enough to write out the shape 
                      of their misery. at the blooming of this garden, 
                      a boy is holding a black rose, mumbling all of his 
                      heartache into the open space of his father’s silhouette,
                      saying: there is blood in the poem, there is blood in the poem.

the blood: the poem is undressing the ache in our bones 
                      and there is no light to examine the darkness.
                      by the dirge, a pyre of comfort is sung into our 
                      pores, we understood the music by the amount 
                      of blood found on the floor, here, a boy is learning
                      how to arrive early at his own funeral, to sing 
                      his mother’s name as he transitions into a dove. 

the flower: i am a eulogy for both the poem and the blood 
                        you call upon me and a massacre unfolds before 
                        your eyes, I am rootless, harvesting the sting 
                        of sorrow, collecting all of the emptiness from 
                        the belly of a rainbow. to know me, is to leave a part 
                        of me at the entrance of a grave, two black birds 
                        finding home through the chronicles of doom.
                        I asked the birds to show me a path to my mother’s arms 
                        they answered with a poem, they answered with blood.

Charly Chow

Marina’s Tears

My mother, an art student, attended the Galleria Studio Morra in 1974 Naples, where performance artist Marina Abramović stood motionless for six hours at the mercy of her audience. She ran her hands over Abramović’s carefully chosen items — a rose for pleasure, a scalpel for pain, a gun for death. She watched the audience tickle, tease, cut off clothes and drizzle honey over skin. She saw a single tear slip down Abramović’s cheek as their touches turned to scratches. “Back then, I thought Marina cried for her pain,” said my mother. “Now I realise she was crying for theirs.”

Joy Yin

Moonlight Prayer

the moon lowers its bowl
and the long dog waits
beside the quiet river
my mother once dreamed
how the body remembers
the creases of your face
folding into tofu flowers
spooned with trembling syrup
hovering over a drowned pearl
we were born from silver
outside the rotten door 
where the hunger begins
every prayer a small cup
opening the throat
like a cracked vessel
still the night wobbles
with the animal breathing
in the hollow of water
beneath the house
so pour your blessings
and i will drink

Aaron Lelito

The estrangement

seen by way of the body
in rapt enactment
in stoned altar
in bleached morning
in terrain recovered
from multiplicity
in bardo of initiation
hours before sun
or shade or stars
they are all one 
way of undoing
outlines sprawling
through white walks
patterns everywhere
how they change
and also
how they enable flight
standing and lifting off
into concentration and abiding

Gillian Craig

I do not care for lakes

I do not care for lakes:
their dank stagnation;
their absence of momentum;
their lack of ambition.
What is there is there,
concealed but present,
trapped in reeds and mud;
the soggy suck
of hoarded sediment.
What is there stays there
lurking but confined.
We hope nothing

comes roaring out
howling let me go
make way
make way
I cannot stand this anymore
these sodden banks
are closing in on me
and I need to know
there is something 
out there
outwith here outwith me,
something fresh; possible; else.

But we are not supposed 
to speak of lakes this way.
We are meant to admire
and find beauty on the surface,
in the surroundings,
the reflection, the fixtures,
as though it were puddle deep:
a lovely view.
Not dignify the terror
straining the meniscus.
But I try not to tell people this.
It might unsettle.