speculative fiction

By Shanai Tanwar

[ throw open Maggie Cavendish’s
Blazing World // Convent of Pleasure
and let her landscape swallow me whole ]
 
my utopia is gay
                  is sapphic
                  is drag queens doing cartwheels over banners that read
         “this is not Rupaul’s drag race”
                  is brown folks making money // shut down the sweatshops!
                  is the Partition of 1947 never happening
                  is military occupation becoming obsolete
                  is childhood unclouded by the force of labour
                  is the Great Barrier Reef minus exponential coral bleaching
                  is LAND BACK
                  is walking home safely without the acute sense of owning a vagina
                  is small pharma
 
fuck any of that “making ends meet” bullshit
 
                                                                                                 my utopia is art, it is the
                                                                                                        freedom to exist without being worth a dollar
                                                                                without bending over twice
                                                          without hearing my roommate get thrown into the wall by her boyfriend
                                       without him having the courage to still cook breakfast beside me the next morning
 
[ hand over Amitav Ghosh’s
The Calcutta Chromosome
and let someone like me
cure malaria for you ]
 
                                        someone brown
                                        someone fresh off the boat
                                        someone whose name is unknown to souvenir keychains
                                        someone spiraling like fusilli on drugs
                                        someone lost in translation
 
this poem cannot be completed, ma, because i have only just started
                             dreaming of it, tasting it, smelling it, experimenting with it
                             birthing it, breathing it, imagining it, nurturing it
                             thinking it, twisting it, expanding it, magnifying it

this poem cannot be completed, ma, because i have only just learnt
​that this yearning for another world has my name written all over it

---

dreaming across borders

By Shanai Tanwar

​your call is important to us please stay on the line
and your call will be attended to
          s     h     o     r      t     l    y 

today i am a woman
today i am a woma
today i am a wom
today i am a wo
today i am a w
today i am a v
today i am a vi
today i am a vis
today i am a visa
today i am a visa        holder
 
//
 
there are papers waiting for
the milk to boil and cats
longing for their passports
to get stamped and visas waiting
for erasers to delete entire
borders away
 
take my hand and stretch the
fabric of my flesh across these
             retina-scanning
             biometric-demanding
             brownness-hating
             family-separating
systems
and transport me directly through the arrival gates
into the familiar territory of your arms
 
because time runs differently for
you and me, jaaneman
our skin looks like chai and its texture is crafted // out of
                                                        a longingness for home
 
i want a future without borders without waiting without surveilling
i want a future with rest with love with my family and yours and
i want a future with love
​i want a future

---

melancholia (for lack of a better word)

By Shanai Tanwar

my words are soaked in mama’s haldi doodh
             and the loneliness of winter on the west coast
 
i like to type my poetry in
Times New Roman and
             “leave” scrunchies at
             my lover’s bedside
 
maybe if i thought hard enough
poetry could pick up the breadcrumbs
and come to me; i lure her like an old
German folk tale for children.
 
i have written for nine years but
             most times it feels like she and i
             need couples therapy
 
i am the sunset and she is the ocean
gulping down all of me;
i can hear the digestion of her waves
do i make for a satisfying meal?
 
is it the same if i read my words
and wish someone else had written them
              is it the same if i read my words
              and wish they were someone else’s
 
i am playing the piano and you are
not listening to me; hold still
              let me toy with your keys
              just for one sheet longer
 
i climb onto buses these days and go
entire journeys without hearing the hum of
new thoughts in my head
 
               if i listened harder, would i hear her
               if i saw better, would i see her
               if i wrote better, could i melt into her?

---

Shanai Tanwar (she/her) is a queer poet of Indian origin living and working on stolen Musqueam territory. She recently graduated with a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. Shanai’s poetry has previously appeared in Plenitude Magazine and Train River Publishing, alongside other writing in Broadview, Chatelaine, The Ubyssey, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, and Cosmopolitan Middle East. Currently, she proofreads for The Ex-Puritan, and enjoys admiring dogs while secretly learning she might be a cat person.