Untying Knots
by Chiemi Souen
Jiji’s garage, there,
under the house. The smell
of dirt, mold, moth
balls, and cat shit.
Fingers clinging to the chocolate-brown lattice
under the mint-green house.
Eyes see through the filtered sunlight.
See:
Cardboard boxes filled with old
photos and papers, empty
sake gallon
bottles, bamboo
fishing poles, throw
nets, old garden gloves,
rusty sickles, rubber boots,
tabis, old rice
bags, shoyu cans, empty milk
bottles, a wooden
washboard, and lots of glass
jars filled with nails
and screws.
photo credit: Manuel Sardo Unsplash
Starlight
by James Kao
A Girl from Zanzibar, a Guy from Goa, and that Chap (from) Mercury
by R. Benedito Ferrão
I had finally arrived, but the start of this journey of a lifetime had already begun badly. Journeying from the metropole – London – to the once colonial periphery – Nairobi – I had made it, but my suitcase hadn’t. In it were the hand-written notes from the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis and a copy of the book that that chapter was based on: Roger King’s A Girl from Zanzibar, published in 2002 and set in the 1980s. As I explained to the travel insurance company, no, I hadn’t typed up any of those notes and, no, I couldn’t reconstruct a year’s worth of work from memory. Perhaps it was the perfect postcolonial metaphor – the loss of a suitcase full of words between the empire writing back and a subaltern trying to speak.
photo credit: Alejandro Luengo Upsplash
Zen Trio Band Retreat
by Nina Kuo