About as full as a trout hung
by its gills in the smokehouse,
guts left to bake in the sun
Author: Porridge Magazine
ESSAY | I Could Sing And The Whole World Could Be My Stage – Isaac Aju
I do not know whether to say that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie saved me or to ascribe it to God as we always do in Nigeria. When we studied so hard and passed an exam, we say it was God who did it…It is popular in Nigeria for Nigerian hospitals to display on their signboards: We take care, but only God heals.
ESSAY | I Have to Tell You – Laura Goncalves Ribeiro
When I arrive, you won’t be sitting at the kitchen granite table, where on rainy days we
shared pumpkin soup. I would not need to rehearse what to tell you at the granite table, with
no one around.
ONE POEM – Olivia Walwyn
First frost of the year
and the river is submerged in mist;
a blaze of sunlight
melting everything to dew.
ESSAY | On the Decline – Sarah Davis
You’re on the decline, she said. I had come for a frozen shoulder. I didn’t even know that could happen. Apparently they just stop working, turn solid, you have to take your other arm, lift them up, plop them down and then they lay there useless. Right now one of my arm pits has deodorant on it, the other does not.
ESSAY | Eating Khichdi in Kenya – Farah Ahamed
Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday, 1st August, 1982
I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words ‘coup d’etat.’ That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots.
ONE POEM – Lee Fraser
are fig leaves poisonous
good first foods
solar powered roaster
basic metallurgy
ESSAY | Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones – Sharon Kirsch
I am the daughter of a man with a TripTik. You may not know what a TripTik is, or you may understand it to be a triptych, a work of art made up of three panels, often hinged together in a sacred altarpiece.
ONE POEM – Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
I get lost in the soft tips of the cedar tree
hanging over the fence
My parents melt into deckchairs
like American cheese
ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien
The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.
Flash Fiction | Ouroboros — Leyda Mar
Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.
ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm
Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.
