Amber Means Wait
The sparrows had nested in a traffic light. They selected the orange filter, periodically warming themselves against the bulb whenever the light changed from green to red, or back again. When I first noticed them, crossing the road on my commute home, they looked like the end scene of a Looney Tunes
Under His Skin
I don’t think he knows I’m here, embedded in his dermis. We ended things in a typical rage: “God, you get under my skin!” And I said what now seems to me the line which sealed my fate: “You’d be so lucky!” And, the next morning, I came to, and there I was. Don’t get […]
Democracy Born in the Wild
Overnight camp is a staple of North American summer: Weeks spent sleeping in bunk beds, nose to nose with the person next to you, tanned skin, and skinned knees against the backdrop of endless lakes. Camp screams freedom; hours in the wilderness with no parental supervision, where the most authorita
Keep
I don’t see it as a word anymore spell out every letter enunciate every syllable begging for kinship from a word so distant, like your grandmother’s saris, the one in the pictures where she smiles unaware of being photographed woven in Banaras, home to poverty and colour, eyes wandering from
Desire in Love
I waxed fiction out of reality at a young age, after my father gave me advice for dealing with life’s vicissitudes: “Pretend you’re the protagonist in a story. Create a world around you to make you feel less alone.” When my family moved from Indiana to Texas, I transformed our new town into
Rubber Fire
Horizon catches the cap of our neighbour’s fire oiling gashes through wood floorboards spiked with old plimsolls. The deadliness is in the sunsink behind the flames: in things suspended there is so much space quivering from absence into being. Strange faith. I tap your shoulder to ma
Observances
I was staring at the spidery print and into the fresh whiteness of my copy of Beowulf one Friday evening last September, while far away and unbeknownst to me, tales older and stranger had begun to sprawl inside my phone. A reticent but attentive member of an English freshers’ Facebook group, I scr
because my mother’s best friend is catholic
today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit – the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, cou
Cinema
My grandparents came from a movie-going age – he would call from the office and my grandmother would dress all her children in evening clothes, and wait. At the cinema, the world dissolved into light and sound, the salt of popcorn on your fingertips, and pink soda that fizzed up your nose,