By Raitah Jinnat

A little girl first learns to read

when she peels away a street sign:

“onion turnpike”.

The vowels tell me that “I O U”

delicious bhorta balled up

into rice. My mom gently feeds

the mash to me from her fingertips:

to care for moina pakhi in the nest.

More perch on Glen Oaks gingko with

fruit whose acrid stink

blooms under my Twinkle Toes,

or on the air-conditioning for

offspring of offspring to come.

I used to hate the trips to the

Jackson Heights boutiques

and the Sagar Chinese:

the subway and steps and

the itch of a net sleeve

pounding my eardrums.

Setting off fuchka and momo bombs,

or Forest Hills live shows

with friends,

I would do anything to

take those steps again.

A little girl first learns to walk

when she peels away a foot brace.

My dad also gently files fables

of life lessons: like of

adding up one to a hundred,

diamonds buried in the wheat.

I first learned of God’s word sitting

on a sky carpet with a cobalt mushaf

bigger than my face at a house in Hollis.

“Alif, baa, taa”.

Each letter, another star

in the sky

to tell my mom about later.

Each letter, prophets like Yaqub

once uttered with Peace Upon Him.

Time and time again,

love is a good home:

narikel tel drenching the scalp,

salwar kameez and sheets fussed with

as guests are about to arrive,

cha for a moment of respite.

I pray harder for a heart

welcoming families and friends like mine,

with an appetite for exploration only

Steinway Street shawarma can satiate.

Burst flames of sundown hues,

and fuckass fake tan

raised in Jamaica Estates,

could never usurp a good home.

Daughters of the world’s borough

look for home everywhere,

God’s word aloud

all this time:

the chirping birds,

the subway busking,

warmth of Corona

radiating for all.

I hope to hear

more of Him, like

on the way back

when it downpours

through and around

Grand Central Parkway,

so more wheat can grow.

Raitah Jinnat is a Queens-based poet and writer. Her Substack newsletter _Raitah, like writer _features personal essays and poetry.

By Saba Zahoor

There’s a microbe that eats radiation,

gathering up its shattered self

faster than it is broken;

brainless slime molds approximating Tokyo’s rails;

and my favorite, the water bears –

the indestructible space walkers.

Fossils that looked back at destruction,

like Lot’s wife

and turned to stone;

flawless obsidian forged in fire,

sharper than a Japanese katana;

and my favorite, the meteorites,

surviving rites of passage

through the atmosphere.

Hope in the face of adversity,

that even war will end one day.

The innate will to meaning,

persisting through ages;

and my favorite – the indestructible belief

that I will one day meet my Creator.

Saba Zahoor was born in Srinagar, Kashmir and currently lives in Saudi Arabia. An engineer by profession, her poems have previously appeared or forthcoming in Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink, Fevers of the Mind, The Asahi Haikuist Network, The Muse India Journal and Critical Muslim Magazine.

By Imran Haq

The laundromat sign reads: For the supportive and dutiful  Citizen!

Blinking

On and on

For this perpetual wash cycle,

spend  2.5 decades to

make sure what’s  ‘yours’  is clean  – safe for your body and mind

Pure white, no unsightly –

Black and Brown. And dried red still remain –

Run it again: it’s for your own good

Use Bleach as needed, as seen on tv –

Bombs stubborn resistance –  eradicates stains, guaranteed!

 Only your heart stays clouded.

Remember to Reload  the Machine  

Run it again: there’s no cost too high

Imran Haq is a Pakistani-American writer who currently resides in North Carolina. 

By Jennifer Aboufadle 

The original purpose of a restaurant’s ledger is simple: to remember.

You record the names of your most loyal guests. Their anniversaries. Their favorite dishes. The teams they cheer for. The organizations they support. You note who prefers extra mint in their tea, who always arrives late, who asks for the corner table and why. It’s a book of hospitality—a quiet promise that someone was seen.

But this ledger is different.

I no longer record orders. I record offerings.

Each entry is a story. A grief. A ritual. A refusal. A memory too sacred to be served on a plate. The ledger has become an archive of legacy—a place where the names of the lost are preserved, not in ink, but in intention.

I do not write what they ate. I write what they carried.

I do not record their preferences. I record their resistance.

This ledger is no longer a tool of business. It is a vessel of witness. A map of what remains. A recipe for survival.

I stopped cooking the day the famine became policy.

The kitchen had once been a place of mercy—steam rising like prayer, spices blooming in oil, knives singing against stone. But when the checkpoints began rationing salt and the markets emptied of lentils, when the soldiers started weighing children and calling it data, I turned off the flame. I swept the cumin into jars, locked the pantry, and left the knives untouched. The oven cooled. The pots slept.

In refusing to cook for the oppressors, I began to imagine another kind of nourishment. If food could be weaponized, then memory could be medicine. I wanted the restaurant to become more than a place of hunger—it could be a newsroom of grief, a journal of resistance. Each bowl of sand, each story offered, would be recorded not as a menu but as testimony. I believed that if the soldiers could starve bodies, I could feed spirits by documenting what they tried to erase.

This was not business anymore. It was journalism as healing. The ledger became my press, the guests my sources, and the stories my headlines. I would not serve them lamb or rice. I would serve remembrance, and in doing so, I would remind the world that we are still here.

Now, there was no menu. No scent of food. No clatter of plates. The space was quiet, warm, and dim—lit by lanterns that cast fractured light across woven rugs and low cushions. The walls draped in fabric stitched with memory: Palestinian tatreez, Moroccan zellige, South Asian kantha. Each thread a story. Each pattern is a prayer.

At the center of the room sat a dry clay oven, cold and observant. Around it, I placed seven ceramic bowls—each filled not with salt, but with sand.

Salt had become too precious. It was hoarded, weaponized, turned into currency. But sand was everywhere. Sand was land. Sand was what they stole when they could not steal the people. It was what they buried the bodies in. It was what remained.

I placed each bowl with both hands, as if offering a body for burial.

Outside, the sun was setting. The guests would arrive soon—strangers, mostly. Each one carrying a story they hadn’t yet named. I would ask them only one question at the door: What do you carry today?

Their answers would not only become record, they would be validated—celebrated.

I moved slowly through the room, adjusting cushions, lighting candles, whispering verses under my breath. From Surah Al-Ma’idah, I chose one tonight:

“Whoever saves one life—it is as if he had saved all of mankind.”

I did not serve food anymore. I served memory. And memory, I believed, could feed what hunger tried to erase.

She arrived just after sunset, her silhouette framed by the lanternlight at the door. She did not speak when I asked what she carried. She only placed her hand over her heart and stepped inside.

Her movements were deliberate, almost ritualistic. She chose the cushion nearest the wall, where the shadows were deepest. Her abaya was the color of ash, and her scarf was pinned with a single silver date blossom. She sat with her knees tucked beneath her, her hands folded tightly in her lap, as if cradling something fragile.

I watched her from the edge of the room, noting how she did not touch the bowl of sand placed before her. Others had sifted, traced, poured. She let it be.

As she settled, the other guests began to arrive—quietly, respectfully. Seven, including myself, in total. They moved through the space like breath, choosing their places without instruction. Some glanced at the bowls. Some did not. The room filled not with sound, but with presence.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low and steady, like the hum of a kettle just before it boils.

“She watched me eat,” the woman said. “That was the last meal. Lentils. Rice. A spoonful of yogurt. She didn’t want any. She said she wasn’t hungry. But she watched me.”

She paused; her eyes fixed on the bowl of sand.

“I salted the rice. I salted it too much. I didn’t know it was the last meal. I didn’t know she was already leaving.”

Her voice did not tremble. It folded inward, like a blanket wrapped around something fragile.

“She watched me eat,” she repeated. “And I think… I think she wanted me to remember. To carry it. To carry her.”

Her fingers twitched, but still, she did not reach for the bowl.

I stepped forward, not to speak, but to kneel beside her. I placed a small slip of paper on the edge of her bowl—a verse from Surah Al-Baqarah, handwritten in ink:

“And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and loss… but give glad tidings to the patient.”

She read it silently, then nodded once.

Later, I wrote her story in the ledger:

She didn’t tell a story. She conjured a ghost. Her silence was not absence—it was visitation. She built her grief like a shrine and placed it in the center of the room. She never named the child. But I understood.

The bowl remained untouched, as if to say: this land cannot hold her. And the mother—she ate alone, but not unaccompanied. The daughter was already gone. Or perhaps she stayed just long enough to watch her mother eat, to make the memory stick, to say: Tell them. Feed them with this.

She salted the rice too late, but the memory was seasoned perfectly.

He arrived with the wind still clinging to his coat.

It was too warm for the weather, heavy and lined, the kind worn for border crossings and long waits in cold rooms. He did not remove it. He sat near the door, his back straight, his eyes scanning the room as if mapping exits. When I asked what he carried, he said, “A country,” and nothing more.

He poured the sand from his bowl onto the rug in front of him, slowly, deliberately, tracing the outline of a shape I recognized but could not name. It looked like a map. Or a wound.

“Before the checkpoint,” he said, “we ate lentils. No salt. Just silence.”

His voice was clipped, precise. He spoke like someone used to being interrupted. But no one interrupted him here.

He described the meal in fragments—his mother’s hands rinsing the rice, the way the pot hissed when water met oil, the smell of cumin rising like smoke. He spoke of the bread, flat and torn by hand, and the way his father folded it around the lentils, as if protecting something.

“We ate quickly. The soldiers were coming. My brother spilled his bowl. My mother didn’t scold him. She just kissed his forehead and said, ‘Eat with your eyes, then.’”

He paused, then added, “That was the last time we ate together.”

I watched the way he sat—rigid, contained. His coat never shifted. His fingers never relaxed. He did not cry. But the sand he poured formed borders that no longer existed.

Later, I wrote his story in the ledger:

He did not mourn. He documented. His grief was cartographic. He mapped his loss in grains of sand, each one a checkpoint, a ration card, a name erased from a registry. He did not touch the bowl again. He left the sand where it lay, a country drawn and abandoned.

He never removed his coat. His story was stitched into its lining.

She arrived with a pouch of dried lemons tucked into her palm.

She didn’t speak when I asked what she carried—just opened her hand and let the citrus rest in mine. The skin was wrinkled, sun-darkened, fragrant with memory. I nodded and gestured her toward the cushion nearest the dry oven. She sat cross-legged, her back straight, her eyes scanning the room like a kitchen she once knew.

Her sand bowl sat untouched for a moment. Then she pressed the dried lemon into it, gently, leaving a small crater in the center. The scent lifted into the air—sharp, sour, familiar.

“He cooked the night before he died,” she said. “Lamb stew with cinnamon and dried lemon. He said, ‘If I die tonight, let it be with cinnamon on my tongue.’”

She smiled as she spoke, but it was the kind of smile that folds grief into ritual. Her uncle had been a chef, she explained. Not famous, not wealthy, but revered in their neighborhood. He cooked with reverence, with rhythm, with a kind of joy that made people linger long after the plates were cleared.

She described his final meal in detail—the way he browned the lamb, the way he crushed the cinnamon stick with the heel of his hand, the way he hummed a song she never learned the words to. She mimicked his gestures as she spoke, stirring the air, tasting with invisible spoons, wiping sweat from her brow.

“He didn’t eat that night,” she said. “He just cooked. He said the food wasn’t for him. It was for the memory.”

I watched her hands as she performed the story. They moved with precision, with care. She wasn’t just remembering—she was resurrecting. The room filled with imagined spice, with the warmth of a kitchen that no longer existed.

Later, I wrote her story in the ledger:

She did not mourn. She honored. Her grief was fragrant, layered, slow-cooked. She stirred the air as if it were broth, seasoning it with memory. The dried lemon she pressed into the sand remained there, a small offering, a sour prayer.

She cooked with her hands, not with fire. Her story was a recipe for remembrance.

They arrived with a folded napkin in their hands.

It was linen, pale blue, creased at perfect angles. They held it like a prayer mat, like something sacred and small. When I asked what they carried, they said, “The first time I broke my fast,” and stepped inside.

They chose the cushion nearest the far wall, where the lanternlight was softest. Their movements were careful, almost rehearsed. They placed the napkin in their lap, then unfolded it, then folded it again. Their bowl of sand sat untouched, but they traced its rim with one finger, slowly, as if measuring something.

“I didn’t know what to say,” they began. “I didn’t know how to pray. I just knew the sun had set.”

They spoke of that first Ramadan—how they had learned the rules from a pamphlet, how they had whispered the ‘Basmala’ alone in a studio apartment with no curtains. They had no dates, no call to prayer, no one to remind them what came next.

“I drank water. I ate a piece of bread. I sat in silence. It was enough.”

Their voice was steady, but their hands trembled slightly. They described the taste of solitude—how it lingered longer than the bread, how it filled the room like steam. They spoke of the ache of not knowing, of the sweetness of discovering that faith could arrive quietly, without spectacle.

“I didn’t feel holy,” they said. “I felt hungry. But I also felt seen.”

I watched the way they folded the napkin again, this time into a triangle. It was not a performance. It was incantational. Their story was not about food—it was about arrival. About choosing to belong before knowing how.

Later, I wrote their story in the ledger:

They did not offer a recipe. They offered a threshold. Their grief was not in what they lacked, but in what they reached for. They tasted faith before they understood it. And it was enough.

They folded their napkin like a prayer mat, then unfolded it like a map.

She arrived with a shawl wrapped twice around her shoulders and a small tin tucked under her arm. It was brass, dented at the edges, and when she opened it, the scent of turmeric and dried mint spilled into the room like a memory too eager to wait its turn.

When I asked what she carried, she said, “I forget,” and smiled. Then she added, “But I remember the biryani.”

She chose the cushion nearest to the lantern with the green glass panels. The light cast a soft shimmer across her face, highlighting the fine lines that moved when she spoke. She did not sit still. Her hands moved constantly—folding the shawl, opening and closing the tin, tracing invisible patterns on the rim of her sand bowl.

“My daughter used to laugh when I cooked,” she said. “She said I measured spices with my heart, not my hands.”

She began listing ingredients—not in order, not with precision, but with rhythm. Cardamom, clove, cinnamon, saffron. She paused often, searching for the next word, sometimes finding it, sometimes not. But when she spoke of the rice, her voice steadied.

“Long grain. Washed three times. Cooked until it sings.”

She could not remember her daughter’s name. She said it once, then corrected herself, then let it go. But she remembered the exact spice ratio, the way her daughter would sneak raisins into the pot, the way they would argue about whether to add yogurt.

“She said yogurt made it soft. I said it made it sour. We were both right.”

I watched her hands as she spoke. They moved like they were still cooking—pinching, stirring, tasting. Her story was not linear. It looped, repeated, wandered. But it never lost its flavor.

Later, I wrote her story in the ledger:

She did not remember names. She remembered textures. Her grief was aromatic, layered, persistent. She sifted the sand as she spoke, letting it run through her fingers like rice rinsed before boiling. Her memory was not broken, it was seasoned.

She forgot her daughter’s name but remembered the exact spice ratio.

He arrived last, just as the lanterns dimmed to their lowest flame.

He did not answer when I asked what he carried. He only nodded once, then stepped inside, his eyes scanning the bowls as if searching for something already lost. He chose the cushion nearest the center, where the dry oven sat cold and ceremonial. His posture was loose, almost careless, but his gaze never wavered.

He reached into his coat and pulled out a single olive—dark, firm, glistening faintly in the candlelight. Without a word, he placed it in the center of his bowl of sand. Then he leaned back, arms crossed and stared at it.

He did not speak. He did not move. But the room shifted around him.

The olive sat like a seed that would never grow. Its presence was quiet, but not passive. It demanded attention. It held the weight of something sacred, something severed.

I did not ask him to explain. I had seen this before—grief that refuses language, memory that arrives in objects. I let the silence stretch.

Later, one of the guests whispered that his brother had died holding an olive branch. Shot while crossing a field. The branch had snapped in half.

I watched the young man throughout the evening. He never touched the sand. He never looked at anyone. But his body leaned forward, then back, like a wave that never breaks. His silence was not emptiness. It was resistance.

Later, I wrote his story in the ledger:

He did not offer words. He offered a symbol. His grief was botanical, biblical, Qur’anic. The olive was his tribute, his protest, his inheritance. He did not perform. He planted.

His silence was louder than grief, the olive was his eulogy.

By the time the last story settled into silence, the room had changed.

It wasn’t louder. It wasn’t brighter. But something had shifted—like breath held too long finally released. The bowls of sand, once untouched or guarded, began to move. Slowly. Gently. One guest passed theirs to another. A hand reached across the rug, not to comfort, but to offer. A pinch of cumin was sprinkled into someone else’s bowl. Someone hummed a lullaby. No one asked for its origin.

They did not speak to each other directly. But their bodies began to lean inward. Cushions shifted closer. Knees brushed. Eyes met and held, then looked away. It was not intimacy. It was recognition.

The mother who had not touched her bowl now rested her hand on its rim. The exile traced his map again, but this time with someone watching. The convert unfolded their napkin and placed it beneath the elder’s tin of spices. The silent guest adjusted the olive, turning it slightly toward the center of the room.

I did not interrupt. I did not explain. I only watched.

Later, I wrote in the ledger:

They did not agree. Their stories did not match. Their griefs were not the same size, shape, or flavor. But they remembered together. They built a landscape from absence—a terrain of memory, stitched from sand and silence.

I recited a verse from Surah Al-Hujurat, quietly, as I refilled the lanterns:

Indeed, the believers are but brothers. So, make peace between your brothers.

No one responded aloud. But one guest placed their bowl beside another’s, and the sand mingled.

That was enough.

I waited until the bowls were still.

The olive sat untouched. The dried lemon had begun to sink. The map of sand drawn by the exile had blurred at the edges, softened by breath and time. The napkin lay folded beneath the elder’s tin. The mother’s hand rested gently on the rim of her bowl, as if she had finally decided to hold what could not be held.

I stood, not to serve, but to speak.

“I stopped cooking the day they asked me to prepare a feast for the soldiers.”

The room did not move. That was the gift of this place—stillness without silence.

“They were celebrating a successful campaign. They ordered me to make lamb, rice, and sweets. Enough for fifty. I asked who the guests were. They said, ‘Commanders. Survivors. Men who did what needed doing.’”

I paused. The lanterns flickered. The oven remained cold.

“I refused. I poured sand into the serving bowls. I placed them on the table. I said, ‘This is what you’ve made of us. Eat it.’”

They beat me. They closed my restaurant. They called me a traitor, a coward, a fool. But I kept the bowls. I kept the sand. I kept the ledger.

I looked around the room now—at the guests, at their offerings, at the stories that had filled the air like steam.

“I do not serve food anymore. I serve memory. And memory, I believe, can feed what hunger tries to erase.”

Later, I wrote my own story in the ledger:

I did not cook. I refused. My grief was not in what I lost, but in what I would not give. I chose sand over salt, silence over celebration. I chose to feed the hungry with remembrance.

They wanted flavor, I gave them land. They wanted celebration. I gave them consequence.

They left quietly, as they had arrived.

No one asked for directions. No one lingered at the door. One by one, they rose from their cushions, adjusted their shawls, folded their napkins, and stepped into the night. The bowls of sand remained—some stirred, some untouched, some marked with olive, lemon, spice. The room held their stories like breath held in a chest.

I did not say goodbye. I placed a slip of paper beside each bowl, handwritten in ink. A verse chosen for each guest, drawn from the Qur’an, matched to the shape of their grief.

To the mother: “Verily, with hardship comes ease.” To the exile: “And the earth, we have spread it out and set therein mountains standing firm.” To the niece: “Eat of the good things We have provided for you and be grateful.” To the convert: “He found you lost and guided you.” To the elder: “We raise in degrees whom We will, and above every possessor of knowledge is one more knowing.” To the silent guest: “Say: I have vowed a fast unto the Most Merciful, so I shall not speak to any human today.”

I stayed behind, sweeping the sand into a single bowl. Not to erase, but to gather. To remember.

Then I opened the ledger.

I wrote a final entry—not a story, but a beginning:

Let them come, let them pay not for food, but for remembrance.

I will host a memorial dinner. Not here, not just once. Everywhere. Guests will offer their stories. I will record them in the ledger, filling their bowls only with sand. The proceeds will go to feed those who cannot speak, those who are silenced by hunger, those whose lands are swallowed whole.

Every grain of sand will become a prayer. Every story will become a meal.

When the idea for a sand dinner came to me, it was meant to be a spectacle—a protest, a warrior’s battle cry. I wanted to shame the hunger-makers, to feed them the land they had stolen. But as the guests came to me, and I began to record parts of their stories in my ledger, I felt something shift.

I felt the impossibility of continuing a starvation campaign if their stories were messages spread across the world.

I had always believed that food nourished and sustained life. But I began to understand that food also holds the legacy of humanity. It is memory, إخلاص (Ikhlas) – Sincerity, inheritance. It is the language of survival.

As I replaced meals with bowls of sand and offered a space for community through story, I realized: without food, one cannot live. But without these stories, we might as well subsist on sand. Because there cannot be life without these stories.

This is my new kitchen. This is my new fire.

Jennifer Aboufadle is a writer and educator completing her B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida (graduating May 2025).  

By Triya Chakravorty

Twelve-year-old Aisha was standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, craning down to get a better look at the patch of thick black hair between her legs. It had spread across her thighs and onto her stomach. 

Her knickers lay discarded on the floor behind her. She was in the guest bathroom, the only room in the entire house that had a lock. 

She’d swiped a razor from auntie Poppy’s medicine cabinet and bundled it into the bottom of her suitcase before she left Kolkata. Thankfully, it had made it back to Heathrow in one piece. 

Aisha reached down and pulled her skin taught. She scraped and scraped until the toilet bowl became a nest of tiny hairs and spots of blood. 

She pulled the flush and watched them all swirl away. 

Hobbling out of the bathroom with a vulva full of scratches, she felt that she was finally a woman. She could have punched the wall with happiness. 

*

“Last year’s campaign was a bit… white, wasn’t it?” 

Bryony, the middle-aged team leader with sunspots all over her cheeks, looks at Aisha expectantly, as if waiting for her to laugh. 

Aisha offers up a half-shrug-half-smile. She glances over at Mirabel, the only other POC person in the room, who stifles a smirk. 

“They’ve asked us to create an ad campaign for their new line of feminine razors. I’m thinking Tiktoks, all under ten seconds, a bit more relatable and,” her eyes flit over to the brown and black girl in the corner of the room, “ethnic, you know?”

She asks everyone in the room to put forward a concept. The person with the best idea will get to lead a small group of people and design the campaign. There’s no extra money in it, but she dangles the promise of a promotion somewhere down the line. 

“We want to empower women to make their own choices about body hair, but we also need to sell these razors. Any ideas?”

There’s a long pause. 

No one offers up any suggestions. The men pick pieces of invisible lint from their trousers. 

“How about a POV series from teenage girls who are athletes?” Lucy, the recent addition to the copywriting team offers. “We could get them to use the razor and film a video about it.” 

The boss chews her pen. “It’s a bit… clean. What about you, Aisha? What does body hair make you think of?” 

The first time Aisha realised she was hairy was in year seven, during her first PE lesson of the year. Her mum had died the summer before, leaving little advice for her only daughter.

It was cancer. Endometrial. When her mum went through her first round of chemo, there was hair all over the house. Aisha got used to picking out the long black strands from the shower drain, and once, even, from her breakfast cereal. 

But then her mum did the selfish thing and died. A house that had been floating along in gender equilibrium had now tipped in favor of the men. Her father and brother left her to her own devices most of the time, and no one had bothered to tell her that body hair was bad. 

Aisha had walked out onto the frozen football pitch, shivering in her too-tight sports T-shirt and shorts. She realised that didn’t look like the other girls, who boasted creamy legs with halos of pale fuzz that glowed in the light.

“It is true what they say about Indians, then?”

A classmate pointed at the forest of dark hairs that grew on her shins. She had wide calves that were dense with black and flecks of dry skin.  

There was laughter. 

Mr Bowman, the PE teacher, put a hand on her shoulder.

“Might want to sort that out before next time.” 

He winked and Aisha felt a wave of nausea rush up from her stomach. 

Later that night, Aisha went into her parents’ bathroom and stuffed her father’s razor, with its thick blue handle and shiny blades, under her top. She took it to her bedroom and barricaded the door with the desk chair (Why do you need a lock, shona? We never had them back home). 

Then, she scraped the razor across her legs and shaved quickly, for the first time. She wasn’t gentle. Desperate to get rid of it all, she pulled off flakes of skin and drew blood. 

The hair grew back quickly. It tunnelled out onto the surface of her legs with a new determination, thicker and darker than before. Aisha hobbled around with hundreds of tiny scabs for weeks.

*

At the meeting, Bryony asks if they can “make the campaign more Gen Z.” 

“Maybe we can get influencers to talk about their first shave,” someone offers. “Play a Sabrina Carpenter song over the clip and call it ironic feminism.” 

The room laughs. 

*

“Aisha, we need to talk.” 

The hairs on Aisha’s neck bristled. Her father never usually called her that, it was always Lolly or Lol.

He called her into the kitchen, which had bright green walls that their mum had insisted made the food taste better. He was standing at the hob, with his back to her. The air smelt like fried garlic and salt. 

“I’m sending you to stay with my sister. It’s for the best.”

He had his back to her as he spoke. The freshly chopped onions made her eyes prickle. 

Aisha gulped. 

He knew. He had to have known. She tried her best to clean her hairs out of his razor, but she couldn’t get them all. She kept cutting her fingers trying to dig in between the blades. 

She wanted to buy her own, but she couldn’t risk being found out. There were only five brown families in her town, so she was easy to spot. What if word got back to dad? Or worse, what if her cousins up in Newcastle found out? Nice Indian girls don’t need to shave. Who are they shaving for?

Her father kept his promise and sent her to Kolkata the following summer. Whilst her brother got to go to Santorini with his mates, she was forced to live in the sweaty confines of her aunt Poppy’s Salt Lake apartment. 

“She needs to be around women.” She’d heard her father whispering down the phone in Bangla one evening. 

Poppy had invited a woman round to the flat to wax her legs. Aisha lay on the stone floor of the side room, watching a green tiktiki scamper across the ceiling as the woman began her work.

It was mid-July and the heat was stifling. Sweat slid out of every pore on her body; it stung her eyes and obscured her vision. Aisha hated going to India. She couldn’t speak Bangla well, and her cousins treated her like a dirty foreigner with no respect for tradition. 

The beautician pressed Aisha’s calf against the table and ripped away a strip of wax paper. She worked up her right leg, to the top of her thigh. 

She pointed at the tufts of black that poked out of her underwear. “Shall I do there also?” 

Aisha shook her head. 

“It’s cleaner. Better for hygiene.” 

Aisha snapped her legs and ran out, half waxed, before the lady could finish her work. She stayed like that all summer, one leg hairy, one leg bare. She was suddenly grateful for the floaty salwar kameeses that Poppy insisted she wore, which hid every inch of skin. 

The day she got home from India she decided she needed to do something about her pubes. 

*

At her company, Aisha spends her lunch hour in the disabled toilets. The fine hairs on her upper lip look thick and prickly in the unforgiving bathroom light. She plucked them only yesterday, but they were already back with a newfound vigour. 

She spends all day staring at the computer, mind completely void of ideas. It’s hard to concentrate with hundreds of emails pinging onto her screen and the notion that she will have to maybe (definitely) sell out to win this project. For a job that she doesn’t really even want. 

She feels Asian in a way that’s uncool. She’s not petite and pale, and her hair isn’t glossy like the Kpop idols and anime girls that everyone’s so obsessed with. It’s not trendy to be her kind of Asian. 

So she’s worried that it may not even work, even if she does peddle her heritage like a genuine-fake shawl at a Gariahat market stall. 

*

Her first boyfriend Anton was a medical student and a swimmer. He was also white. The kind of white that glowed when you paired it with the deep blue of a borrowed kurta – the one he wore when she brought him as a plus one to her Geordie cousin’s wedding. 

He was the kind of white that made the other brown girls burn with envy and the brown boys whisper “slut” as she walked past. 

Aisha didn’t care; she was flying. Because Anton’s biceps had biceps, and with him by her side, her course mates finally cared enough to learn how to pronounce her name. 

That first hurried night in her university halls, she’d insisted they keep the light off. Anton had never slept with a brown girl before, and she didn’t want him to have any nasty surprises.  

Afterward, he laughed and said, “you should really shave down there. You don’t want to live up to the reputation of… you know, your lot.”

She cut herself deep trying to get it all off later that night, and walked around spotting her underwear for a week.

The second time they slept together, he put his hand around her throat and whispered, “you like that?”.

She didn’t. But she moaned like a porn star and hoped he wouldn’t mention the way the stubble on her pubic mound kept scratching against his skin. 

*

Sometimes, when she’s alone and she’s sure no one will disturb her, Aisha fantasises about being Medusa. Beautiful but cursed, with serpents for hair. The snakes would whisper to her in a language only she could understand. Men would turn to rock and shatter at her feet. 

Maybe there’s a Tiktok campaign in that?

*

Her current boyfriend Jacob calls to ask if she wants to come over to his place for dinner. 

He’s nice enough. He gets his news from Al Jazeera and is generous with his back rubs. He even says he likes her pixie cut more than the long hair she grew for years. But Aisha can’t help but feel trapped, like she’s sleepwalking into forever with him. 

Once, during sex, Jacob coughed and pulled away, saying, “I think I swallowed one of your hairs.”

His voice was kind, but he stopped going down on her after that. Aisha never spoke of it to him again.

*

“I appreciate the opportunity, but I can’t work here anymore.” 

Aisha cites her elderly grandparents and says she wants to spend more time in India before they pass. That sounds better than the truth, which is that she doesn’t want to fight with herself anymore, or be part of passing that fight onto other women. 

Bryony doesn’t try to stop her from resigning. She just nods and wishes her well. Aisha doesn’t know if she should be happy or insulted at the realisation of just how replaceable she is. 

On her way out, she passes Mirabel, who’s balancing a cardboard tray of Costa coffees on a heaving ring binder. 

“Congrats. I heard you got the razor gig. What’s your angle?”

Mirabel looks at the floor. “Own your roots. Black girl magic.”

A moment passes. 

Mirabel rushes to fill the silence, almost spilling her coffee. “I know how it sounds but I’ve got a mortgage to pay and Dave can’t work because of-”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” Aisha squeezes her shoulder. “I get it.”

*

Aisha is awoken in the middle of the night by a noise outside her window. It’s a heavy, thumping sound, like what the tail of a snake might make when hitting against glass. 

Something feels different. 

She rolls out of bed and pulls the blinds open. There she sees a long black plait floating in the air. It stretches up into the night sky and disappears above the clouds.

She pushes her foot into one of the twists and hoists herself onto it. The smell of coconut oil wafts in the darkness around her. 

The plait lurches forwards and suddenly she’s in the air. 

Clinging on, she rises with it, leaving London behind, then Earth too. She floats in the serene darkness. 

She knows she’s dreaming, but for the first time in a long time, she feels free.

The following morning, she pulls out a long black hair from her Weetabix and smiles. 

Hi mum, she thinks. Are you looking down on me now?

Triya Chakravorty is an Oxford graduate and a doctor training in psychiatry. She is interested in intersectional feminism, mental health and the diasporic experience.

I ache

blisters popping, pus dripping

the cuts on my toes grind

along the dusty ground

littered with the bodies

of my brothers

with bullet holes

in their backs

I ache

as clumps of my hair

like gristly tumbleweeds

crumples from the slightest breeze

as my single burlap sack

of patched clothes

and a wooden pot from my great-grandmother

becomes too heavy

for my straw thin arms to bear

as I see my Blossom

struggle to stay

on her own swollen feet

her belly grotesquely bulged

as these demons

their privilege carried on sticks

pressed our hickory bodies

forward into the dust

we move further from home

our warm sun replaced

with a cold, gray one

that freezes over the blood stuck below our toes

I ache

on this trail

of execution

to which I see no end

where my words do not reach.

Forhad Rahman is a Bronx-based writer and photographer. He has been published in journals such as Cherry Tree, The Bronx Magazine, and Bronx Narratives.

By Olayioye Paul Bamidele

halima called my name on her gwaji;

a thin warp of rippleness. i, a pregnant sky,

watered down. how much music can heal.

her fingers, like tiny wands, stifled the storm

eating me at night. depression molded into

dappled water. friend, if you ever touch peace,

you will understand how desert you’ll be

without it; how you will be a harmattan tree,

aching to sing songs with leaves. & at this point,

you’d crawl into a cede. wind toppling ashes.

i tell you, muster your arms for peace. if it says

it wants to fly, train your limbs to gather wind.

& if you can’t, tuck yourself behind the tesbih.

here, halima played and the whole borno listened,

ears blistered with smokes. hold your peace tight

like anything; don’t squeeze its gold. i came

searching mine on this harp; perhaps I’d

pluck it as the sound rolls on.

Olayioye Paul Bamidele won the Paradise Gate House Poetry Prize 2025. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Spillword, Lunaris, Daily Trust Newspaper, Artlounge, Afreecan, Ice Floe, Afreecan, Kalahari, LILAC, SprinNG, Readers Boon, Feral, Black Moon, Eboquills, Brittle Paper, Poetry Columnnnd, IHRAF, Synchronize Chaos Mag, Kissing Dynamite, Kalahari, UNN, Lolwe, Kreative Diadem and elsewhere. 

You think you are a piece of shit.

That’s why you can’t understand
How important you were in my life, Habibi.

You’ll probably read my book,
dedicated to you
and be horrified.

All you had to do
was see me as a human,
treat me like a human
and you
were a revolutionary.

You changed the whole trajectory of my life
and will do the same
for every girl like me
from a bilad family
who reads how I lived you
how I wrote you.

Your legacy will be beautiful.

But yeah,
all the two-man
and pick-up line
and “Can I crack you both at the same time?” Instagram reels
that you like –
I’d think I was a piece of shit too,

sometimes.

Thank you
for changing my life.

You’re welcome
for writing you
and showing you
the hero you are.

May you live up to it.
But also
grow up.

H.G. is an American poet based in New York. She holds a MA in history and is currently working on her first novel-in-verse.

so much depends upon

whether I can separate

ash from dirt

yesterday, the snow was fresh –

the way it tends to fall early morning, (I admit)

it reminded me of your voice, when you let it

be gentle & tea became kitchen lullaby so I started

coating lies a maternal pink

that sunset gave me

                        *

when I read the Quran, dirt-crusted

fingers trace right to left,

striving to feel

where there is no structure but silk song

& orange sun he wove into my hair

I cling to anecdote now,

to stitch open wound – the way my immigrant

parents do – let it seed my voice box & flower

hyacinth in throat

                        *

today, braced for barefoot

winter, he left a handful

of congealed snow in my palms

threatening the laws that govern ice.

Nadia Kirmani is a first-generation immigrant from Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BS in Biology and BA in English from Duke University and is currently pursuing an MD at Stanford University School of Medicine. She writes poetry on faith, grief, and preservation.

The first thing Laila hears is the alarm clock’s rattling buzz, a $3 plastic thing from Goodwill blinking 6:02 a.m. in stuttering red. It is 2006, but in this apartment the year feels older, worn soft as the peeling linoleum, as if time here moves slower than everywhere else.

From the doorway comes the scrape of boots, Baba’s, she can tell, by the cough that always follows his night shift, a mix of gasoline fumes and bitter coffee clinging to his chest. His boots have soles half-detached and his name stitched in threadbare black, a name they never say right. Today is the first day back after winter break, which means two lunches to pack, two alarms to beat, and no excuses.

Mama has already left for Arby’s, so Laila wakes early too, stitching the morning together with tea and Kamran’s buttons. The air still carries traces of her mother’s work, fryer oil and watered-down detergent clinging to the apartment walls. Arby’s opens early, and someone has to filter the fryer oils before the manager gets there. The ceiling creaks, not because it’s alive, like she used to believe, but because childhood ends like insulation: quietly, invisibly, behind the walls. Like rot behind paint.

She pulls on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, though it’s already warm. Mama says her arms should be covered, that a girl’s skin isn’t for the world. At school, that’s enough for them to whisper she must wear a headscarf, too. Laila has learned not to argue, just as she’s learned how to tuck her shirt past her hips, how to say “I’m not hungry” when the other girls ask why she never eats lunch. There’s no mirror in their apartment hallway anymore, it shattered last year when her parents fought with the landlord about rent. Now, she smooths her hair using the microwave’s reflection. It’s too thick for braids, too fine to wear with pride.

By 6:30, she’s in the kitchen boiling tea when Kamran leans against her side, yawning, still rumpled in his superhero pajamas. He shouldn’t be awake yet, school is hours away, but in a house this small, the scrape of boots and the kettle on the stove tug him from sleep whenever Laila stirs. She buttons his shirt and wipes milk from his cheek while Baba leans against the wall, not really awake. He hasn’t slept. His gas station shift ended just an hour ago. He smells like gasoline and old coffee, his shoulders hunched under the weight of another night of swallowed insults. Laila is only in eighth grade herself, but mornings have already made her feel older. She doesn’t ask him how work went. They all know. A man yelled. A child stole. Someone tossed pennies and laughed.

Sometimes, Baba tells his friend Rami, a fellow immigrant from Kabul who once studied medicine, and who the children now treat like an uncle, things he won’t say around the rest of them. Laila only hears fragments from the hallway, like how a drunk man refused to take change from “a terrorist’s hand.” Or how someone filled their tank and sped off laughing. Once, a man called him a cockroach with an accent. Baba didn’t say anything. He just rang up the next customer and swept the floor with shaking hands. In Afghanistan, Baba built bridges. Real ones, across rivers. Of steel and stone. Spanning valleys.

Here, he scrapes gum from concrete and gets told he’s lucky to mop. “Once,” he told Laila, “a flood split two provinces. I built the bridge that stitched them back together.” Now, even holding a mop feels like a punishment for pride.

Mama has her own share of quiet humiliations. At Arby’s, she scrubs toilets and smiles through the sting of bleach. Customers complain that her accent is “too thick.” A manager once joked she should stay in the back so she wouldn’t scare off families. Mama nodded and scrubbed the fryer until her knuckles cracked. Her degree in literature from Kabul University is tucked into a plastic sleeve beneath her sweaters. On Sundays, she sometimes takes it out and wipes it clean with an old scarf. No one ever sees.

She once told Laila she used to recite Hafez poems in front of chalkboards so old they curled at the corners. Now, the only words she memorizes are “Would you like curly fries with that?” and “Sorry, we’re out of roast beef.” Her pride stays folded between apron straps, buried beneath a name tag that says “Marie.”

On the nights he can’t sleep, Baba adjusts the antenna on their small TV and hunts for Afghan news through the static. The footage is grainy. Soldiers on rooftops. Smoke where markets used to be. Women sobbing behind hands. Baba leans forward like the screen might breathe him back home. Mama never sits when they watch the news. She just stands behind him, arms crossed. Laila once saw her mother press her wrist, the one where her gold bracelet used to be. The bracelet her father gave her for graduating valedictorian. She traded it at the border for Kamran’s milk, for papers, for the kind of future that doesn’t come with jewelry.

“I’ll walk him,” Laila says. Baba nods, eyes closed.

The walk to Kamran’s elementary school is three blocks. Laila holds his hand tight. The pavement is cracked, weeds clawing up through the breaks. A sprinkler stutters to life and splashes their ankles. At the crosswalk, a car honks. A voice yells something she doesn’t catch but feels.

At the school gate, Kamran tugs at his backpack straps, still too loose on his fourth-grade shoulders. “Do you think I’ll be the only brown kid in my class again?” he asks, his mouth bent into a grin too quick to be real.

“Probably,” she says. “Make it count.”

He grins and runs off, his backpack thumping against his back. Laila watches until he vanishes into the crowd of sneakers and noise. Then she turns and walks the next three blocks to her middle school. Alone.

Her first class is English. The teacher mispronounces her name again: “Lye-luh.” Laila doesn’t correct her. She just turns in her assignment, an allegory about a girl who steals rainwater to grow a secret garden. Then she waits.

“Use simpler words,” the teacher says, frowning. “You’re not writing a novel.”

Laila nods. She’d pieced those sentences together like patchwork, word by word, in a language that never fit quite right.

During silent reading, the girl behind her kicks her chair. Twice. Her leg twitches for the next ten minutes.

The rest of the day unspools in soft blurs. In the cafeteria, she unwraps the lunch she packed that morning but eats quickly, not looking up as two girls wrinkle their noses at the smell. “Bet she wears a headscarf in the shower, too,” one of them mutters, as if the cumin in her lunchbox was reason enough. Laila doesn’t even wear one. But rumors are resilient, like mildew in corners, like rust on old memory.

In math, she scores a 93 on her test. Her teacher smiles. At home, that won’t be enough. Her mother will glance at the paper and say, “Next time, study harder.” Not because she’s cruel. Because she remembers being the top of her class and still ending up cleaning floors.

School ends at three. She picks up Kamran at the gate, his backpack slipping off one shoulder, an action figure clutched in his fist, a hand-me-down with its cape fraying, though Kamran swears that only makes it fly faster as he swoops it through the air on their walk home.

Rami is in the kitchen that evening, head bent in his hands. He says he has a headache and stays slumped at the table while Laila moves quietly around the stove. She doesn’t press. Like Baba, he works too much, odd jobs, late shifts, paperwork he can’t quite decipher. Back in Kabul, he’d carried books heavier than his body; here, even the smallest bills slip through his fingers. Baba had asked him to stay for dinner, easier than watching him go home to an empty kitchen.

So tonight it’s Laila who stirs the lentil stew, the kitchen thick with cumin and soap. Kamran sits at the table, giving his action figure a new name: Captain Fix-It. He makes him fly across the salt shaker. “He doesn’t need his arm to be strong,” Kamran says.

The apartment feels full, not with space, but with trying.

When Mama comes home around 5:30, she’s limping. A blister the size of a coin has burst on her heel, and she’s tracking vinegar across the tile. Still, she starts chopping onions without sitting down. Her apron smells like meat and lemon cleaner. Her eyes are red, not from crying, but from nine hours of grease.

“Your science quiz?” she asks.

“Ninety-three.”

“Next time, study harder.”

She says it like prayer spoken through cracked teeth, believing if her daughter could outrun failure fast enough, maybe the past won’t catch them both.

Baba wakes briefly during dinner and asks about the rent. Rami lies and says it’s fine. He doesn’t need the notices to know—the silence when the phone rings, the way the landlord lingers at the door, it’s enough. Laila knows it isn’t. The lights flicker sometimes for no reason at all.

Dinner is rice and lentils. Kamran eats with his hands. Rami jokes about his sticky fingers. Kamran giggles so hard he snorts. For a second, everything glows. Then Baba snaps, tells Kamran to quiet down. The joy drains from the room.

The belt hangs near the door. It hasn’t moved in weeks, but they all remember the night it did. No one speaks of it. But everyone sees it.

One night weeks ago, Baba hadn’t meant to lose control. It was late, and the power had just gone out again. Kamran had been crying for over an hour, unsettled by the dark and the thick summer heat. Baba raised the belt once, not out of hate, but out of exhaustion. It left more silence than pain. Afterward, he sank onto the floor by the door, the place he always stopped short of bed, as if it were the only ground low enough for his shame, head in his hands, though the table stood untouched, as if the quiet were punishing him back.

Laila watched from the hallway, small and still. Later, when she tried to name what she’d seen, only a verse rose to meet her:

 “And when the girl who was buried alive is asked: for what sin was she killed?”

A verse from somewhere holy, older than grief. Her mother used to murmur it while washing rice, letting the words drift through her fingers, as if they could ward off the world. Some verses came like mourning doves. Others came like rules. 

“Men are the protectors and maintainers of women.”

Laila thought of the word protector, and how soft it sounded beside leather. How love, starved long enough, shrivels into silence. And how some daughters learn to flinch not from strangers, but from the hands that once rocked them to sleep.

Tonight, after everyone else had gone to bed, Baba stood in the doorway a long time, staring at the belt. Then, quietly, he unhooked it and placed it in a drawer.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her.

And somehow, that was enough for now.

Later, Mama opens the freezer. “Someone left these at Arby’s,” she says, holding up a box of strawberry ice cream sandwiches. She doesn’t smile. Just unwraps them and hands them out, one by one, like offerings at a shrine made of plastic and hunger. They don’t bother with the table. Instead they sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor, knees touching, like worshippers lowering themselves, as if being closer to the ground could keep the moment from being stolen away by the world. Kamran gets it on his cheeks. Rami draws a face in the condensation on the fridge. Baba is asleep again. Mama closes her eyes while chewing, like tasting memories.

The next morning comes quickly, and school hours pass without much to notice.

By the time the last bell rings, the day has already slipped into noise. That afternoon, Baba takes Laila to the gas station, his version of bonding. Errands done in silence, under the buzz of fluorescent lights.

Laila doesn’t mind. She watches him sweep, refill windshield fluid, and change the receipt paper. Even tired, he stands like a man who remembers how to carry weight.

A man walks in. Red ball cap. Loud voice. He throws a crumpled dollar on the counter.

“Keep the change, terrorist.”

Laila freezes.

Baba just nods and counts coins.

But today, Laila doesn’t.

She steps forward. “His name’s not terrorist.”

The man turns. “What’s it to you, towel girl?”

Laila’s voice trembles, but she holds his eyes.

“It’s to me,” she says. “He built bridges. He’s my father.”

The man snorts. Shrugs. Leaves.

The silence afterward cuts deeper than the insult.

Baba doesn’t look at her. Just finishes counting.

The manager calls. The cord stretches between Baba’s hand and the wall, tight and trembling.

“Causing trouble.”

“Can’t have complaints.”

“We’re letting you go.”

Baba doesn’t speak. He just listens, nods once, then sets the phone back in its cradle like it might break.

His hand stays on the receiver a moment longer than it needs to.

Outside, a car honks. Inside, the clock ticks.

And still, he doesn’t speak.

The silence presses against her chest, teaching her what it means to carry a father’s quiet like another piece of furniture in the room, heavy, unavoidable, always there.

That night, he doesn’t speak at dinner. Mama stares at her hands. Rami had dropped by again with a wrench in his hand, but he stayed long enough to share their meal. He promises he’ll help with the rent if it comes to it, though the words hang heavier than his wallet can carry.

Laila says nothing. The strawberry wrappers from last night still sit crumpled on the table, left there when everyone was too tired to clean up. She smooths one flat and folds it into a tiny rose, placing it near Baba’s spot on the floor by the front door, where he lingered as if half-belonging elsewhere, his boots nearby, his hands always shaking but never asking.

He looks at her.

And nods.

Later, when the others are asleep, Laila stands at the window beside him. Outside, the street is quiet. The moon hangs low, like it’s listening.

“They think we’re all the same,” she says. “Like bin Laden. Like the ones who did it.”

She remembers third grade. The day the towers came down. A boy asked if her family was celebrating. She had only blinked.

Baba doesn’t blink.

“We should say something.”

A long silence.

Then he says, “You said enough.”

Laila wants to believe him. But the belt remains in the drawer, not vanished but recessed, its silence heavier than sound. To hide a thing is not to erase it; certain objects retain their gravity even in darkness. It hasn’t moved. But it doesn’t need to.

In the other room, the $3 alarm buzzes against the dark, a sound too thin to fill the space it breaks. She stands, walks to the freezer. The last strawberry wrapper sits crumpled on the floor. She picks it up. Smooths it flat. Folds it into a rose. Then tiptoes to his side and folds the rose into the hand that once steadied hers when crossing rivers.

And though they will call him a terrorist again come morning, tonight his daughter gives him Kabul, folded small enough to fit in his hand. His hands once built bridges, meant for homes, for roads, for daughters. When he falls asleep, fingers curled around the paper rose, she watches the silence soften. It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t safety. It is only a verse steeped in rice water and prayer, left behind to bloom in his palm.

Sophia Baryalai is a second-generation Afghan writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Lemonwood Quarterly, World Insane, Seaglass Literary Review, Beyond Words’ Father anthology, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She also serves as an editor for Mockingbird and Wire.