Images spring to life from even the most mundane of things — anything vaguely reminiscent of our times spent together, I guess. An old man selling ice cream by the road, and suddenly I'm transported to that magical alleyway leading to the subway from school. The sun beating down on our backs and reflecting off the white concrete walls in obtrusive waves;  sweat staining our uniforms; strawberry flavoured ice-cream wrapped in a loaf of cotton-candy coloured bread; that sleepy monotone...

(The result of an english class assignment. My teacher gave us four lines from the original poem and a few keywords then told us to make up the lines in between)


In his dark room he is finally alone
Light is red
Hands trembling over sceneries of rural fields
Stained the shades of war.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
England and Belfast and Beirut
And Phnom penh
Foreign soils rich with iron.

Something is happening....

I feel like I’m grasping at strings,
My heart cycled in an infinite loop:
Beleaguered sanity
Infernal state of mind.
Closing a cold fist over my arteries
My aorta
tendrils blocking bloodflow
It’s stupid, I know,
To hope for something as distant and dubious as the twinkling stars of Orion,
But I guess that some part of me deep inside just aches.
Fragments from half a decade ago splintered in my endocardium
Burnt Sienna and Cobalt Violet—
Bleeding wine from...

Streaks the sky, pink blue and yellow


like a rose river

or a delta emptying

into the ocean, draining its elixir

heading everywhere
going nowhere. 


Jordan's deserts in the distance——

a red sea of clouds
are sand dunes layered.

Extending farther than the eye can see,
a pilgrimage lasting forty years.


'look at me,' the glass dome whispers,

it implores,

'look at me——
            and think of home.'

“We’re not going to make it in time,” I huff.

The sun is a ticking clock: forty thirty-nine thirty-eight more minutes until dusk. Strands of warm, yellow light percolate through the canopy like hanging threads of string swaying in the autumn breeze. Dry leaves the colour of sand crumple under my worn boots, crackling as weakly as the sounds of a dying fire.

My father walks ahead of me, cool beads of sweat trickling down his neck. He wears a...