SolsticeBy Manahil Bandukwala
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I don’t believe that days get longer,
not when the sky still clouds & a storm makes the boundary between night & day fade away. Fire is a snaking line like water like air while the morning rain drops. I don’t believe in an order to all of this. I want the littered sun, the tufts of fur left on trees. The snowballs never could reach me. Don’t ask me but if you do know I’ll tell you there is no such thing as time. Just wind & smoke & puddles existing side by side. See the apocalypse. I say it will wait for me to unearth every broken glass fragment. I say we always have all the time in the world. Riding the TideBy Manahil Bandukwala
Straddle these jagged rocks
with no relief. How many of the same cobbled streets did you walk? How many colonial fantasies took hold of the way your hands moved? Return crushed up, a shell I painstakingly glue back together. Placed upon a shelf with other beach treasures. The wind has had you for years and finally, now you return. SubalternAfter Kamila Shamsie
By Manahil Bandukwala
She slices the eggplant, zucchini, banana
with a dull knife clenched tight in a fist. Blade thuds against glass table. Let shards fly into food she doesn’t eat. He comes home at 9 p.m. each night and eats at the dinner table alone long after she is in bed. Some days she walks on streets with menstrual pads taped to a sign. Other days she slowly poisons the hand that chokes her neck. Manahil Bandukwala is the author of two chapbooks, Paper Doll (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Pipe Rose (battleaxe press, 2018). Her work has appeared in publications including PRISM, Room, The Poetry Annals, Parentheses Journal, Coven Editions, Bywords, and other places. She was the 2019 winner of Room Magazine’s Emerging Writer Award. See her work at manahils.com.
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