ON THE PLANTATION
OF DAUGHTERS
Uncanny Magazine
6 September 2022
Speculative Poetry
komarika (that you may find solace when spurned, your fingers searing supernova around the perimeter of diyas; that even when clay ceases to calm you will be caressed; that when you ride
to battle there will be balm
keeping vigil in the tent;
that your hair will grow back
as often as you blade it stark
to your skull in mourning,
in mutiny, in signaling beacons and transports of joy—
TRICONA
Strange Horizons
14 March 2022
Speculative Poetry
now that the last unstaked earth
we can claim is the triangle wedged beneath fore and hind wheels
I burn with hunger for cremation knowing
you will feed my embers to the chassis
at night and gather me close
in the oil-choked morning
and not be imprisoned for littering
and I will do the same for you.
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
Uncanny Magazine
1 March 2022
Speculative Poetry
Every day you leave
I think about leaving you
and Chaya from Marketing says
Marie why don’t you bring your man
to the borrels anymore
and Chaya’s sisters are shifters
and I could tear the plowed fields apart with them for miles after work and dark
and you’d never notice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NOTES FROM A CROSS-CULTURAL SUMMER
SAGA Vol. 83, May 2020
1st Place, SAGA Prose Award
Nonfiction
I’m in a landlocked naval base two hundred miles from my hometown and all the people who know my signals are oceans away, scattered across four continents. I eat and say thank you and keep my food down and I know there are unknown men in the corner of every room, but they’re soldiers, so I can’t even track their footsteps.
SCHMETTERLINGSKÜSSE
SAGA Vol. 83, May 2020
Nonfiction
Look into them and everything disappears except the sky, bleu de triomphe, the spirits of souls. Raise your head; the benedictions fall into you. Schmetterlingsküse. You haven’t seen butterflies in aeons but here they are now in their jeweled millions, Jezebel and the Leopard and the Ceylon Tiger, parantica taprobana, not to be confused with the Tamil Tiger, winging across the island to Samanalakanda, where the Buddha's footprint appears at sunrise.
IES ABROAD BLOG
AMSTERDAM
Fall 2019
Butterflies, Crossroads, The Universe: Answers I've Found In Amsterdam
When the boat docks in the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, it’s begun to rain. The captain hands passengers up out of the canal, bidding each one a merry Goedenacht! I pull up my hood and wend my way through De Wallen, towards the bright lights of Prins Hendrikkade. My Dutch friends avoid this part of Amsterdam, but it's one of my favourite neighbourhoods to spend a last evening; slipping through narrow alley-streets, boots ringing on rain-slick cobblestones, watching for new wonders around every corner.
TUSKER BLUE
Strange Horizons
15 August 2022
Speculative Fiction
“Please,” the voice begged again, and this time there was something terribly familiar about how it wisped at the edges. You turned and Hailé was hunched by the counter, holding the Rift in his bare stomach together with his hands. Blue memory fluid, almost but not quite the shade of an April sky over the paddy fields, flowed through his fingers and down his sarong before coiling away through the ankle-deep water.
SKIN DEEP
Cartridge Lit
26 May 2022
Poetry
Rampart is everyone
I’m scared you imagine after I leave
so stereotypically brash, so phenotypically neat, the East India Company vowels
so freshly unboxed, so unlike my IRL tongue that can’t untangle w and v
because my language will soon be too extinct to earn subtitles.
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.
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 –
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.
PROOF POSITIVE
Vasquez-Valarezo Award 2019
1st Place
They are everything, these raw tearing words that could have been written for you,
and you had to come here, red lipstick smeared on the lip
of the mug you drained to ease
that down-deep clench
and something is happening.
Red draped around you like a flag.
I HOLD THE DOOR
SAGA Vol. 82, May 2019
2nd Place, SAGA Poetry Award
The world unfolds
in a Rock Island coffee shop.
Maroc, France, Deutschland, Italia.
You make December pilgrimages
to your mother’s country.
I eye your charcoal curls
and the length of your lashes
as you talk of Rajasthan
and traversing the Ganges.
ATHTHI
SAGA Vol. 82, May 2019
Barbara Anderson Miller Award 2019
3rd Place, SAGA Prose Award
Nonfiction
I am standing in a Hobby Lobby parking lot, thinking of Aththi. The sky is an enormous blue, cross-stitched with jet trails from planes so high that I have no chance of hearing them. The light, though, is the same gold that gilds Aththi when he walks down the drive to close the gate for the evening. Time zone math insists that this event has already happened eleven hours ago, eighteen thousand kilometers away, but let me now imagine him, standing at the gate.