essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
I receive a call from my mother. It is to tell me a recipe for tortang talong, which she learnt last night in a dream.
A drunk girl came up to me in a club last week and told me, yet again, that I look exactly, no, exACtly–Sarah! Come over here! Doesn’t she look exACtly like our Hannah?
Vacant of leaves
and shell-wrapped gifts,
dad and I can see the sky.
the fox and i
shared one glance
i think about it all the time
and as soon as I touched the freezer’s handle,
the tar wall behind it rippled.
I’m ready for the ritual
where I get crowned a
crone.
While I sleep
pygmy elephants
journey across my bedroom floor.
In lattie we held martinis,
un-clobbered each other –
left our cats on the floor in nishta.
Rather than a distant past we can simply overcome or attempt to forget, our relationship to the historical atrocities of violent imperialism is difficult and clearly far from over, despite attempts to suggest otherwise.
When my body was made up of straight lines it felt boyish and uninteresting, and when those lines finally bent, they felt uncontrollable.
Every year, while the people who crowd around the Christmas Eve table might change, the chili is always just as delicious, and just as cheap to make.
How would it be to find oneself reflected as “both handsome and unexceptional”, or find one’s back captured unawares from behind, “broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars”?
Porridge 