Stockholm Syndrome
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea” (Genesis 1:26) Three fish are bored. They pass the time thinking. “Why are we here?” one asks. Another answers: “If we were not, then who would force those simple sea [
Icebergs
CLOSING SOON. Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch, Tate Modern, 2018 We had come for the melting icebergs. We came early, clutching phones and children, to our space before the Thames, where the artist had assembled those lumps of cold whiteness. A menagerie of endangered specimens of ice – it wanted so
A Woman Disobedient
No tattoos, my abuela says es feo, muy triste paying someone else to give you scars, one eye on her telenovela and the other on my arm, she says no more pie
Swiping White
When Pittsburgh-born author Celeste Ng tweeted that she didn’t usually find Asian men attractive because “they remind me of my cousins”, she couldn’t have foreseen that she would be castigated anonymously as “another white-boy-worshipping cunt” and accused of raising the next Elliot Rodg
Where Are You From?
Not London. Cities with other litanies: Snow Hill, Nechells, Harbourne, Lozells. The late bus from Birmingham, cupped by the fierce hand of the Black Country, and house-proud Solihull, stealing looks, stuck out on its own down the Chiltern line, to Marylebone. Cities with other rivers, other bridges
Whitby Harbour
You can’t quite put a finger on it – whetted, held up to feel the wind. Maybe it’s something on the – &nbs
Tasbih
(I don’t want this poem to be in English) I once called you rosario, a crucifijo clenched in the hand of Abuela whose lágrimas are a stuttering lluvia que cae al rancho. It cuts carretera-stones, prays for the roadside skulls of drunken sons. I want men to stop leaving her: for Abuelo Güicho to
Somewhere in Düsseltal
The young woman pays Frau Manuela Grobbel the 200€ deposit. Well, she follows Frau Grobbel through the house with the money scrunched in her hands like a Monopoly player about to pass GO. Her name is Ebba. After paying the deposit, she receives a ring with two scratched silver keys. One is for the
Portokalia
“out of nothing I have created a strange new universe” – János Bolyai We were left an orange, sunset-blotted, not the golden apple we forgot. We were left a portokalia, when we stopped seeing, piles of leaves and mounds of mud gathered around the garden under our feet. We were left lost l