YENE ZEMA, FIKIR
Transition
Issue 131, November 2021
Nonfiction
Their names surround me now, both the ones they have given me and the ones I have given them as protection, each one a cup infused with so many strains of tea: emotions, adjectives, the whole of the Holy Bible. Their names mean leader, shield, blessed, and pure; their names mean beautiful, Sheba, queen, and joy. They have names that sing of silk, of fabric rustling over red terracotta floors, of ancestors commanding endure; they have names passed down from Noah, over eons and oceans, through infinite worlds.
7 P.M. IN AMSTERDAM-OOST
Off Assignment
13 December 2021
Flash Nonfiction
In this neighborhood, every building is a jewel box, windows flung wide; we don’t believe in curtains, my Dutch friends tell me, because we have nothing to hide.
SANCTUM
Random Sample Review
Issue 6, October 2021
Flash Nonfiction
You knee-walk off the bed and wear his slippers into the bathroom. The boys in the house have no toilet paper and the way Fox is telling it, neither does anyone else in the state.
AYZOSH
Sky Island Journal,
Issue 18, October 2021
Poetry
The Tamil script is an abugida,
like Amharic, like Sinhala;
it slips through my fingers faster
than grains of Jaffna sand.
There are no words in any of my tongues for everything I want to say.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Sky Island Journal,
Issue 18, October 2021
Poetry
where do i buy pregnancy tests
where is Walgreens near me
where is my insurance accepted
where will they send me if i get
where can i get an abortion for free
NOVENA
Sky Island Journal,
Issue 18, October 2021
Poetry
-
Do your nails pink like smoked tilapia
-
Does the hair on your knuckles
-
Does the sleight of the pen weigh
-
Does the underbelly of your lips
AIRPLANE MODE
Lammergeier,
Issue 10, Autumn 2021
Flash Nonfiction
They leave at 3PM on a Sunday.
Four hours after the taxi braves the plummeting jackfruits and cavernous potholes to disappear down the lane, you find your sister’s sandal waiting upright by her bed.
KATTAKUMANJAL
Lammergeier,
Issue 10, Autumn 2021
Flash Nonfiction
Our next-door neighbor wields incense to ward off mosquitoes. Every evening she circles her yard carrying a copper saucer of benzoin, boiled down to the consistency of treacle. The smell stays with us forever after the first inhalation; it clings to clothes, hair, sinuses.
TO THE WOMAN OF COLOR WHO OFFERED ME A POST-VACCINE LIFT
ANGLES,
Issue 9, Summer 2021
Poetry
Could you believe I knew every song
they played on the tannoy
in those thirteen minutes –
Oasis and John Denver and Bob Dylan and the ghost of my grandfather
sipping arrack in his gardening clothes
listening to Gold FM,
right before the soldier-nurse asked me
do you have a fear of needles.
IGLOO
Club Plum Literary Journal,
Vol. 2, Issue 3, July 2021
Flash Nonfiction
Afternoon sunlight. A radiance through the stand on the opposite bank, startling the snow into iridescence, sequins embedded wherever the light touches. Promises and gold. There’s a science to it, but you’ve forgotten.
BULLETPROOF
SAGA Vol. 84, May 2021
1st Place, SAGA Poetry Award
America is burning, smoke bombs
and teargas,
and my best friend’s head is haloed
by fluffy black curls,
and I switch off the stove
and sit by the unlocked door until
he knocks rings the doorbell texts me knocks again,
because he’s remembered too.
FREEFALL IN REVERSE
Vasquez-Valarezo Award 2021
3rd Place
dis is also dec is also dys,
disturbance breeding deceit
birthing dysfunction.
I stand over myself
in the middle of the night crooning
welcome to the rest of your life.
THE INVESTIGATION IS STILL ONGOING
Entropy,
1 September 2021
Nonfiction
I have been justifying, as so many of us do, my actions and my life after the fact. When in fact none of it is relevant, because I wasn’t the one who put all this in motion. But that’s how we’re trained, isn’t it? That’s how we’re raised. I’ve provided the background, Your Honour. Now let me present the facts of the case.
FLAYED
ANGLES,
Issue 9, Summer 2021
Poetry
I am cracked leaf skin the wrong shade of brown decaying under thermals and socks and camisoles and sweaters and tights and jeans and lingerie and leather and hats and scarves and gloves and if you wanted to peel me into pieces it would take you longer than it would to build an igloo outside the dormitory ice piled on ice piled on ice fingers losing all feeling and so disappearing –
LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
SAGA Vol. 84, May 2021
3rd Place, SAGA Prose Award
Nonfiction
The kanji hangs over my head and weaves itself into my dreams. 忍/shinobu/endure. It’s an eighth-century Japanese ideogram, rendered in thick brush strokes on an A5 canvas daubed to look like parchment; my little sister and I painted it together, one of the last things we would share before the coronavirus pandemic trapped us on opposite sides of the globe.
FOR [REDACTED]
Vasquez-Valarezo Award 2021
1st Place
You said, “I’m risking my life to do this,”
and then you asked me to name
your activist Instagram page.
kilometres away
your people were being massacred
and who was I to say no?
Somewhere in
a soldier wiped down his bayonet;
his friends holstered their smartphones.
JEWEL PATIENCE
Sky Island Journal,
Issue 16, April 2021
Flash Fiction
No one told me that the spirit against whom I would have to guard would be a woman with skin as smooth as a ripe brinjal, that her hair would be braided tighter than the ropes of my fishing nets, that she would speak a language older than Sinhala and I would understand her anyway.