essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
You caught me, Foxglove, with your upright colour. You turned me from the river thinking I had been alone. I liked your pale and speckled belly, and the tiny fragile hairs guarding your mouth.
“For most of us living in Europe or the US, we’re so used to seeing altered rivers that we don’t know what a wild river looks like.”
Most of my life-years,
you were already dead. Even in our brief overlap
you were not known to me.
It’s hard being a poet in 2020
Which is when this will be published
If you have the GUTS to publish it
Which I doubt
Being bitter & twisted
In response to your suicide letter, I write that I now order a bowl of vegetable ramen from the local Izakaya whose waitlist fills up twenty minutes before its five pm opening.
C.S. Barnes reflects on her complicated relationship with food through the years, from comfort eating to comfort starving. Features discussion of eating disorders.
I swam in the Gulf of Thailand with you.
I held you, small as a kumquat, in my own dark, small sea.
I often think of telling you
There is something wrong with time here.
I’m not sure whether I age faster or, quite the contrary –
Once we’re introduced again, I’ll be annoying in my youth.
She’s pulling up weeds from the flowerbed
And then starts feeling one tug back,
Wrapping her water grip and dragging her
Through the claggy earth.
This rockmelon is bloated with guilt
Sweet, near-rancid, on the knife’s edge of festering
Press down and it will oblige
Glossy lips, upturned in a cheesy grin. This is what I see when I think about the morning I left my country. The lips of a Ronald McDonald statue, painted red to match its garish hair and its clown’s outfit. Broad lips stretched into a smile that seemed much too bright under soulless eyes. I…
My earliest memories of goulash are full of warm, satisfying sensations—soft, chewy egg noodles draped in thick brown gravy and big chunks of beef adorned with a few key ingredients like green pepper, onion, and paprika.
