For the last several months, the front wall of my home office has been emblazoned with a series of motivational quotes, ostensibly to remind myself that there is light at the end of the metaphorical and literal tunnel we all find ourselves in. For a recovering anxious person, though, these post-it stickies were there long before the pandemic started and will remain long after it ends. They are constant touchstones for the mental health recovery journey that I began in the fall of 2018 and that continues to this day.

The one that really stands out, and around which this editorial hinges, is taken from Elizabeth Gilbert’s magnificent ‘Big Magic’.

“Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. The rest will take care of itself.“

Elizabeth Gilbert’s words found me at a time when my identity was so closely intertwined with this magazine that simply charting the possibility of who I’d be outside it was debilitating. Chance encounters with friends felt serendipitous–a lunch where a friend linked me to Gilbert’s TED talk and then, a few weeks later, finding the book open on another friend’s coffee table. It felt like her words were calling out to me or my soul was desperate to find an odd kind of kinship with another creative journeyperson. It was the kind of “big magic” at work that made reading the book itself an odd homecoming.

When you’ve been involved within the creative arts for a long time–I first started a small writers’ collective for South Asian writers at 19 and then, six years later, this magazine–you can’t help but form an identity around it. The seas I charted then were treacherous for a teenager who was desperate to find her people and fit in, channeling her go-getterness into something productive. So, when I saw an advert on Orkut, the little social media network that Google hoped would challenge Facebook, I knew I was on the right track. Four months later, we moved to our own website that I helped build, and that was it. I grew up in that place, staying until I was 25 before moving to the UK to pursue a master’s in creative writing, the other thing that kept me sane. What happens when you accomplish everything you ever wanted? You dream bigger. Or you allow yourself to fall in between the cracks. I did one and then the other.

Most of my twenties were spent in creating frameworks for other people until I knocked against a moment, early in my thirties, when I had nothing more to give. I’d burnt out. Consider a flaming ball as it streaks across the sky before hurtling back to the ground, still alight. That was me. I consumed myself and everything around me. Until I had energy for only one thing: asking for help.

Much of my recovery was spent doing things that I’d always wanted to do but felt like they didn’t align to my “purpose”, a word that is bandied around so frivolously, forgetting the impact it can have on young minds. So, on a whim, and after holding onto the urge for 21 years, I signed myself up for drum lessons, bought an electronic drum kit, and have happily been playing the drums for three years. Fortunately, the conversations around mental health today suggest that there is more to life than what you do. And so, in an odd sort of way, I have come full circle. TMS is evolving, as life often does, morphing and shaping itself into a space that offers just such a reprieve. 

The months ahead are busy and forward-looking, seeking collaborations with other digital spaces and outfits, to see how together, we can build a more accessible world for the creators of tomorrow. In ways that perhaps we weren’t afforded but that, by virtue of having been in the game for as long as we have, we now have the chance to extend to others.

As much as I wanted to push it away, TMS has, by the very act of subsisting for as long as it has, been the real revolution in my heart. For a person who has been writing since she was 11, that is not an easy declaration. In a lot of ways, writing saved me from myself, but that’s a lot of pressure to put on a creative art. The journey back to the magazine has shown me that I need not be any one thing. I can be an editor and a writer and a budding tennis player and a drummer and a communication professional and anything else that I want to do and accomplish in the future. 

We are not just one thing. We are parts of a whole that we haven’t discovered yet and I, for one, can’t wait to weather the storms ahead and get on with the journey.

quite the life i used to have
quite the beauty i used to be
quite the future i had lying ahead of me
the conviction with which the sun
used to rise and set in my window
was really something, kid
i had a look in my eye, i had a cat on my sill
you should’ve seen the boys that i had in my bed
you should’ve heard the pretty little thoughts in my head

yes i was celebrated
yes my name dripped off the lips
of every mouth that mattered in every
room that floated above the city like a mirage
yes yes i was gracious about it all 
that is what they remember about me:
my subtle smile my tilted head
my lowered gaze in the face of profitable praise
oh, of course, my waist was narrow –
oh, of course, lashes were long –
but what they loved best was the way
I made like I didn’t deserve a single bite
of the candyred apple that was passed around every night
but really, kid –

you should’ve seen the kittens i tried to keep alive
their eyes glassy with mortality their mouths full of flies
you should’ve seen it kid
if you did 
you might forgive me

Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She is also a Fulbright scholar, currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Crossed Genres, Cities+Secrets, Where Are You Press, Rising Phoenix Press, The Noble Gas Quarterly and L’Ephemere Review, and The Aleph Review. She was also a finalist for the inaugural Zeenat Haroon Prize.

Marcos Guinoza is a Brazilian graphic designer and digital artist. His collages are inspired by human feelings like loneliness, melancholy, emotional disturbances, disorientation, and confusion in the face of a seemingly meaningless and increasingly absurd world. He has been influenced by minimalism, Russian suprematism, surrealism, and artists like René Magritte and Edward Hopper, among others.

if love is
dead and I
am saved alive

who am I 
was I who
will I be

a dream puts
me under and
I lie out

cold my shadow 
falls away in 
one two three

directions in the 
hard stare of  
a surgical lamp

body is stung
to sleep both
hidden and exposed

mind reaches for
a tray scalpel
clamp curette retractor          

surgeon washed in
a pure gown
figured with blood

probes the cavity
cell under cell
dissects the hurt

as if a botanist
marks a transect
crawls the ground

counts shoots
what lives here
here and here

three of me
cut selves who
beg the needle 

the silk suture 
the rejoiner come
slip mercy through

Kristin Camitta Zimet is a poet and a surreal photographer in the United States. Her poems are imagistic and her art is metaphorical. Her poetry can be found in her book ‘Take in My Arms the Dark’, and in journals and anthologies in seven countries.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

I see my mother when I hear the number 3/4
“3/4 cups flour and 1/4 cup water,” she used to say 
When we made my favorite blueberry pancakes
By the emerald marble stone window sill in the kitchen 
Only the song of a lonely nightingale keeping us company
While it awaited its next flight. 
“3/4 cups,” I whispered to myself 
While trying to figure out what exactly that meant. 

We never really understood each other, my mother and I. 
She was the strongest elephant in the herd 
While I was a lone wolf lurking in the woods. 
Her heart seemed to beat blindly 
To an invisible drum hidden within 
The wrinkles on her chained palms,
While mine was fuelled by voracious fires of the rebels 
Being born behind the windows opening in my almond eyes. 

I wish she knew who I was 
And who I wanted to be. 
I wish she realized that I wasn’t 
Carved numbers in rigid cups 
But the universe and its moons and stars 
Compressed into a big black ball
Patiently awaiting the BANG! 

I was not the blueberry pancakes
Being made by emerald marble stone window sills
But the lonely nightingale awaiting its next flight.
While she might have been 3/4 cups of this and 1/4 cups of that
I was the jet black ink flowing in
The sonnets that my fingernails bled with.

Neomi Vira is a 19-year-old poet and psychology student. When she isn’t writing her next poem, she is reading her next favorite book. Often finding inspiration from the people around her, she believes that words have the power to stir hearts. Reach her on Instagram @neomi.vira.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

I feel divorced from most discussions of grief and loss. In many ways, absence to me has been more bearable than other kinds of pain. It is better than hatred and disappointment. There’s almost a relief in not having to grapple with a living, changing person who is morphing and taking up space in unexpected ways. But sometimes I think of the losses I will incur over time anyway, and how unprepared I am for them. During the pandemic, left alone to my devices, I had time to ponder things I normally never made space for. What will I be left with in the empty space where there will be no possibility of changing? Where will I leave things with someone I love, or tried to? In the poem ‘Apple’ by Ayesha Raees I find the perfect encapsulation of how it feels to turn away from the possibility of pain; to revel instead in the abundance of everything else. But it is in moments of good fortune when I have felt my losses most acutely.

Raees describes herself as a “hybrid poet.” Her writing holds the promise of resolutions, some of which are universal, but most are ancestral and personal to her own history, only enhancing their familiarity. Raees’s poem are experimental and rich, especially this one. I think of how there are multiple connections between the fruit, the tree, the soil; the child and the mother; health and illness. The images travel in a circle, arriving at a single point of origin. 

There was a longing in 
the carvings of the knife 
my mother held against the fruit.
She peels with 
quiet permission.

There’s something unsettling and yet oddly calming about the opening verses of Ayesha Raees’s Apple. Permission from whom? Who is withholding, and what? I know the answer: permission from the vagaries of fate, unexpected setbacks, chaos and tragedy. Permission which I refuse to take because I know it will never be granted. Fate and I have an antagonistic relationship. For a long time, I refused to give into grief as though by doing so, I would be admitting its power over me. Instead, I trudged right past it, collecting all the ways life had wronged me, plotting my triumph. When I think of my grandmother’s death, it’s a foot in the door that lets in all my turbulent and ugly feelings about grief. 

My Nani Amma loved ramen noodles. She loved them because they were soft and she could whip them up quickly. Towards the end, when she was really sick, she made herself some noodles and added in the seasoning, packet and all. I fished out the little packet from her bowl, and we all laughed–my sister and I, packing up her clothes (my sister’s wedding was a few weeks away). “I was wondering why I couldn’t taste anything,” Nani Amma chuckled, shaking her head ruefully. By the time the wedding took place, Nani Amma was deep in a coma in the hospital, the outfits she had delightfully picked out for the wedding in a plastic bag under my desk. We knew she was dying, and, like the weather, knew that we had to plan around it. When it eventually happened, I was at school, laughing with a friend. My mother called me and told me they were going to pick me up a little early for the funeral. And that was it. At the time, and for months afterwards, I had no real understanding of her death. We had been anticipating it for so long, I was simply relieved. Now nothing worse could happen. The clothes remained under my desk for a full year, until my mother put them away.

Earlier in  the 
day,  I ate without 
touching from a tree– 
some hanging  game  
with my hands tied 
behind my back, the  
apple stalk noosed  by  a 
single white thread, and 
my mouth snapping to 
catch the fleshed body 
at sway.

Apple carries in it the desperate juxtaposition of things which cannot be reconciled. It is as though the narrator is warding off a truth they are not yet ready to assemble and face. Hands tied behind her back, grappling with unease and awkwardness. Ayesha Raees takes the image of a whole, healthy, juicy apple, but as she bites into it, this central image falls apart. What lies at its centre?

The undercurrent of sickness and grief in the poem can be felt in its discussion of the apple which to the mother is a last resort, but something almost disgustingly abundant for the narrator, when she writes “Grossed heavy/in spit and juice, all/that is my mouth drips/down my chin”. The mother’s apple is subdued but resilient, “still alive without/its season”. The other apple, however, is “noosed”, hanging almost like bait, but it also reminds me of a kind of atonement–a different kind of hanging. Artificially connected to the tree, it is bursting with life, turning the narrator into something less human and more “animal”. It gives no wholesome nourishment but only serves as a reminder of a kind of lack; the opposite of health and appetite. The apple is grotesque. Life, in the presence of death, is unseemly and unbecoming. After loss, I almost cannot stand the injustice of other people getting to have and to hold–so easily, so carelessly–things and people they love, while I feel like I have had to beg for crumbs. And at the same time, I am disgusted with my miserliness. Do I believe my grief is a punishment? Are other people not being punished enough? Is suffering penance? People are allowed to be happy, I tell myself. Ingratitude is unbecoming. And it’s tiring. 

It sugars 
the dead leaves of 
autumn fall, dampens 
the soil enough for it to 
hold close my drenched 
voice.

I think of my Nani Amma’s wrinkled hands. Her last days when her appetite dwindled and she said she couldn’t taste anything. In many ways, she was my origin, and in many ways now, she continues to live on in me. In many ways, I’m glad she’s not here. Pain was a frequent visitor in her life. Had she been around now, I would hate the thought of having to explain the pandemic to her. It’s one more painful event I’m glad she gets to sit out. 

For my mother, the loss is deep and acute, and seems to be getting worse as she gets older. At times she talks about it as though she had a responsibility, almost a motherly one, towards her own mother. She recounts small slights, little (and big) arguments and disagreements, and wonders how she could ever have let them happen. I told her once that there is no way she could carry that; no way for her to parent and protect her own mother. In that moment, I was doing for her what I think she wished she could still do for Nani Amma–console her. It is an act of service that is now denied to her forever. 

Perhaps the lesson here is to be thankful for the things the universe provides, unasked, even as the things we love are taken away. It is a cruel benevolence, and I am a long way from acceptance.

Maham Khan is co-editor of The Missing Slate.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

after noticing that i don’t 
say my namaz, or keep my rozas
or read my quran and thus far have
no plans to complete 50% of my faith
by getting married, after becoming
too afraid to even ask what i believe 
or rather don’t believe, anymore,
my grandmother invited me to sit beside 
her on the stainglass jaan-e-maaz
and gently asked what surahs I knew.
a meagre list: fatiha, ikhlas, qadr
each known for their brevity.
why don’t you recite just those, 
for me, right now? here, take my
dupatta.
I rolled each surah of my tongue for her,
concise and fluent, all the while thinking
that this – the act of cutting up sawab 
into bitesized pieces so they may be swallowed
by someone who could not palate the meat of religion – 
بالکل ویسے جیسے وہ بچپن میں مجھے لقمے بنا کر دیتی  تھیں
was perhaps the greatest worship of all. 

Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She is also a Fulbright scholar, currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Crossed Genres, Cities+Secrets, Where Are You Press, Rising Phoenix Press, The Noble Gas Quarterly and L’Ephemere Review, and The Aleph Review. She was also a finalist for the inaugural Zeenat Haroon Prize.

Andreas/SurrealGradients is a 23 year old self-taught digital artist. His artworks are an escape into surreal worlds, and by the use of photo manipulation, his artworks come to life.
Some of his collections are available on OpenSea.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The world, a baby tied to dynamite, 
a butterfly perforated with poison 
arrows, burdened with deception in bones.
We rise as emissaries to God, our
bodies blue with reason, three quarters 
of the time, the rest, inked with florets, tiny
tendrils of bread with miniscule kisses 
of Turkish honey. We start by wiping 
down the constellation, then our hungers–
we write ourselves anew in God’s bulletin.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable Books’ Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart multiple times. Her poetry collections include Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian, and Urdu, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth. 

Andreas/SurrealGradients is a 23 year old self-taught digital artist. His artworks are an escape into surreal worlds and by the use of photo manipulation, his artworks come to life.
Some of his collections are available on OpenSea.

Haseeb Sultan is an orthodontist, writer, and artist living in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Scheherezade Junejo was born in 1986 in Karachi. She graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore, in January 2010 with a BFA (Honours) degree. Scheherezade has produced seven solo exhibits and participated in over 70 group exhibits, both national and international since June 2010. You can read her interview with The Missing Slate for our Spotlight Series here.

Ever since she was a little girl, there had always been one thing she wanted – marriage. 

This wasn’t limited to just the idea of marriage, or the event in itself, it expanded into a lifestyle where she longed for everything from pre-marital courtship to being brought breakfast in bed every morning as the sun shined through a very specific kind of white curtains that she had imagined she would decorate her house with to witnessing her husband pass away peacefully in her arms after a life of contented happiness and marital bliss – always he who died first in her mind because widowhood was the last aspect of marriage she wanted to experience in order to come full circle. When her friends in medical school would talk about post graduate studies and pour over brochures of universities abroad, she would scroll through designs of wedding dresses for all five events she knew she wanted and had already planned in her mind to great extent. When her colleagues would apply for medical camps in places like Turkey, she would instead look at hotels near the Bosporus where she could go on her honeymoon – would a billowing frock look more romantic on the edge of the strait or would it be better to get the most out of photography if she wore a black leather jacket against the swirl of colors in the sky kissed by a sunset? It would all depend, she had to admit, on whether she would already be pregnant at that time or not. 

Ever since she was a little girl, there had always been a particular plan. 

Yet, a day before her wedding night, when her prospective sister-in-law called to say that the carved silver tray she wanted her ring to be placed in as it was carried down a carefully designed isle had not been delivered, she had to shove her closed fist in the folds of her ceremonial clothes and suffer through a mehndi only pretending to be cheerful. A day after her wedding, when she had woken up to a slumbering husband who preferred to be served breakfast on the family dining table by his mother, she had to plaster a smile on her face and bear it while she dug her nails into the side of her thigh under the table. And a week after the ceremony, when international travel had been declared limited due to the onset of COVID-19, she had to settle with barely suppressed annoyance for a smaller, lesser romantic jaunt to one of the few mountain resorts open for tourists in a city nearby. Even this assuming hill of a mountain she had to share with everyone like herself who had gotten married just as the sun set on their collective plans for the future. In moments of weakness, if anybody had asked her what she had truly wanted, she would have told them about the violent images that flashed through her mind barely moments before she overcame these.

“It’s a wife responsibility to bear with the shortcomings of her husband,” she said to her mother while reporting her daily progress on the phone. 

“But none of this is really fair to you,” her mother said with a sigh. “I would have liked to see you happy and settled.” 

“I am happy and settled with even much less, ma.” Sadaf wandered to the window in their hotel room and absentmindedly looked out towards the valley spread out some distance away. “You wouldn’t believe how desperate some of these couples are,” she commented. “They seem like they ran to the courts to get registered just before the lockdown so that they didn’t have to postpone the wedding till after. They hardly seem to know one another, let alone be able to tolerate a lesser honeymoon than they must have planned for the sake of their partners.” 

Her mother laughed. “Most of them wouldn’t make it out of the lockdown together,” she predicted. “Girls nowadays don’t know the first thing about marriage, and this time they will have to spend in such close proximity to their husband and in-laws is really going to drive them to their limit.” 

“Hmm,” Sadaf agreed. “So many of my friends who got married earlier found it so difficult to make and maintain relationships with their extended families that I wonder what they would have done in a situation like this. At least then they had some time, and space, and privacy to actually have gotten to know one another and even then, they were unhappy.” 

In the nook of the adjoining balcony, she saw a nesting dove that had fluffed up its wings and settled deeply over its eggs. Instinctively, her hand went to her own belly. 

“Compromise,” her mother was saying across the line. “It’s truly a lost virtue, and the staple of any strong relationship.”

It had already been close to a month since she had been married. They had come to their honeymoon a full three weeks ago and every week, her pregnancy test had come out negative. 

“If a woman cannot tolerate the conditions she finds herself in, I would readily say that she was never ready for marriage in the first place.” 

She could only wait for her monthly cycle to begin for things to become clearer. On part of her husband, she had started to doubt that he was even trying. 

“You’ve taught me so much,” she replied to her mother abruptly. “It is because of you that I am whole heartedly who I am.”  

“Kind, forgiving, accommodating and nothing less,” said the woman who had known Sadaf since the moment of her inception with robust pride. She also caught the sadness in her daughter’s voice. “Still nothing?” she asked gently. 

Sadaf shook her head before she could form the word in her throat. 

“Are you eating the mixture of nuts like I told you to?” 

“And the fennel seeds, and the fatty fish, and as many dairy products as I can lay hands on,” she smiled at the memory of the massive bowl of yogurt she had devoured for breakfast. 

“Then maybe you need to see a gynecologist?” 

“I’ve been to two here,” she said turning away from the window and returning to the side of their bed. Lying down on this, she confessed something that had been bothering her. “I don’t think there is anything essentially wrong with either of us,” she started hesitantly. “I think there is something darker at play.” 

As though jolted, her mother spoke with quiet urgency. “What is it?”

Sadaf twirled the tying ends of her red silk pajama. She was supposed to be already dressed for the day, but the water in the shower hadn’t been as warm as to be to her liking so she had sent her husband down to the reception to figure the matter out. “There’s a woman in Eman’s family,” she began. “One of his aunts, if you remember? She was in the front row at our wedding because she’s papa’s only sister–”

“The one who had joked about having fought for your case when the marriage proposal had been sent?” her mother interrupted. “I found her crass, and I told her to her face right then that this was a love marriage lest she was under any other assumption!”

Sadaf felt the blood burn in her cheeks. She sat up abruptly. “How dare she,” she explained through gritted teeth. She had come to an unknown family, given up the love and comfort of her home, trusted practically strangers all in the name of love, and all this woman had done was go to gross extents to make her feel uncomfortable. She had even jinxed her happy prospective pregnancy with her evil eye. “She calls Eman every morning, especially asking for me and then very pointedly enquires after my health,” the words came pouring out now that she felt riled up. “She even had the audacity to send flowers all the way out here with a big cake and a card that wished us well on a happy and fruitful marriage!”

Her mother gasped audibly. “There really is no saying how far some will go!” 

“It’s just not right,” Sadaf said, her eyes beginning to sting with tears. “She’s known that this is what I’ve always wanted in life – a healthy husband, and the wellbeing and happiness of my own family! And she is absolutely out to get me.” 

“I don’t think you should go back home to any of them again,” her mother advised frankly. “You should lay down the rule that for the safety of your health and well-being, it’s either you or her.” 

Sadaf had been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, the more her mother’s words sank in, the more she believed she had been thinking along the same lines for quite some time. Even when she had come to her then future in-law’s home when the matter was being finalised, she had felt something to be awfully wrong with that specific part of the family. “Her daughters all go to work like they don’t approve of my staying at home,” she recounted from the two or three encounters she had bravely powered through with them. “They never have time to come see me, to come to my game nights on Tuesdays, to even come to my baking sessions after work,” she swung her legs off the side of the bed and moved them around anxiously. “Their father, the phupa¸ acts like he is the most loving man out there – trying to hug me and ask me if I liked the minute gold necklace they gave me for the wedding. It’s just rotten blood, you know?” 

“I know!” chimed the mother. “These people can only mean bad for you and the baby. They probably can’t see somebody else’s daughter find marital peace of that sort. They have no grandchildren of their own, do they?”

Sadaf laughed bitterly. “But how can they when their daughters are out there succeeding in the world. Like my getting married was the lowest form of human enterprise.” She covered her belly once again with her hand. 

Her mother sighed again. “What does Eman have to say about this?” 

“Nothing,” Sadaf said simply. “There are days when I share my insecurities with him and all he can do is tell me that I am being paranoid.” 

“You need to convince him,” her mother said. “Men don’t really believe in these things. They can’t tell good from bad and just seem to take people at face value.” 

“He says she as good as raised him, and his cousins supported him through very tough times. He says they all grew up as one big family.”

“What nonsense!” her mother exclaimed. “His only family is you and your child.”

“That’s what I keep telling him,” there was a sudden cramp in her side and she grasped at this with one hand. “But he says I need to understand that his own family he is the sole provider for, and this extended family he owes and really loves. He wouldn’t part with any of them.” 

“You need to convince him,” her mother repeated with emphasis. “What have I taught you?” 

Her lower back was starting to ache as well. “To be wholeheartedly myself,” she said. 

“Good,” replied her mother. “This can’t go on and they need to understand that. It is imperative that you put your foot down…just imagine! What will the woman and her daughters be satisfied with? For you to miscarry?” 

“God forbid,” Sadaf said, forgetting her pain momentarily to reach for a wooden surface to knock on. “I would do anything for the safety of my child.” She was a good wife, she was going to be even a better mother. She knew she was cut out for it. It was the only thing she was cut out for. This was all a plan. It was all one big conspiracy to run her out of home and marriage, she knew it. 

“Can I call you later?” she asked. “I need to talk to Eman.”

“Yes, yes, of course!” her mother said, urging her. “I understand everything, meri jaan. You do what you have to do…but remember that you are kind, forgiving, accommodating and nothing less. No matter how much they try to, don’t let them scare you into giving up your place. You are absolute courage.” 

“I am absolute courage,” she replied. In her mind, she recalled that she is also kind, forgiving, accommodating and nothing less. She repeated this to herself after the call ended over and over again. The more she said it, the more she felt her body respond to it. It was as though a talisman imbuing her with strength. Even though there was a sharp pain in her side, she paced the length of the room waiting for her husband. 

Was he party to the whole scheme? Did he at least know what kind of heinous crimes his family was involved in committing? Or was he so naïve as to believe that nobody was jealous of their marriage? He was a handsome man, a musician. She was sure there must have been times his aunt had dreamed of getting her daughters married to him. She, on her part, was a prize. There was hardly a woman she had personally come across who held such passion for domesticity as she did. Didn’t she know how women envied her? She had always faced it. In school, her friends used to make fun of her, they used to call her crazed, and desperate, and deluded. They didn’t appreciate that she found the much coveted happiness in as simple an endeavour as the dream of marriage when they couldn’t possibly have found it in between covers of brochures and the pages of a job application – what with their colourful scrubs, and suits, and drawing tablets, and their nine to five jobs, and their “unwinding” on the weekend with one partner or another; did they really think they could fool anybody into really believing that they were happy? 

She was happy. 

And she was under threat, too. 

The doorknob rattled. Sadaf swirled in her footsteps to face whoever entered, and when she saw her husband’s face appear form the end of the door, instead of greeting him with the excitement any newly wed must feel at seeing their partner, she grabbed the saltshaker on the side table nearest to her and flung it at him. 

“You know, don’t you!” she shouted. 

Ducking behind the door with great agility just in time, Eman missed the metal projectile aimed at him and shouted back at her with renewed incredulity. “Have you lost your god damn mind again?!” 

“You know!” she accused, leaping towards the vase on the table next to the window. 

He quickly entered the room, closing the door shut behind himself with a kick, and jumped at her outstretched arms before she could reach the next thing that would have been aimed towards his head. He held her by the shoulders and shook her lightly. “What on earth are you going on about?” he asked, his eyes betraying worry. His dark circles had deepened over the span of the previous weeks and his cheeks had hollowed. 

“They’ve gotten to you!” Sadaf wailed observing these. “You were so beautiful when I married you!”

“What?” Eman asked, resigning himself to whatever rabbit hole she had spiraled into this time. 

“They’re constantly out to get us,” she sobbed. “They took my baby from me, and now they’ll take you too!” 

“Who?”

She pushed his arms away and shoved at him. “Don’t lie to me!” she shouted. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Her eyes squeezed into slits as she viewed him. “I’ve seen the way you look at your cousins! You’re positively drooling.”

Eman’s jaw slacked in disbelief. 

“You’re a sick man!” Turning away from him, she attacked the curtains at the windows and pulled on them till one of them let out a telling shredding sound. “You don’t realise that your wife is pregnant,” she moved to the couches and flung the prettily arranged cushions one by one onto the ground. “You don’t see that these things stress me out, that they might harm our baby,” she moved to the wardrobe next and started dragging out her clothes. “You think I married you for the fame, for the things,” she threw one dress at her feet, “the jewelry,” then another, “the easy life,” and then another. “But you are wrong! I married you because I fell in love with you. I gave up a career as a doctor for you.” 

Eman ran a hand through his hair and just looked at his wife. “I don’t want you to be upset,” he said. “I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong.” 

“You don’t know?” she screeched, turning to face him, and standing completely still. “I am kind,” she said, digging a finger in her chest with such force that he could have sworn hearing a knocking sound. “I am forgiving,” she said, “I am accommodating,” she said. “And nothing less”, she finished. An electrifying cold settling over her heavy limbs. “What you have done wrong is that you haven’t cherished me,” she said. 

Maybe it was time to be a little less, she decided. Her hands closed around the hanger she had been holding. A voice in her head nudged her on. She could be three fourth kind, and forgiving, and accommodating. When she felt as though she wasn’t being heard, as though she was being positively hunted, as though her marriage, her husband, her child were at stake, she could be something else. She could be a little angry. She could be a little violent. She could rip out his hair. She could stab his aunt. She could set fire to their house and watch what her daughter’s professional training did to help them save their home. She could do it. She could make a home out of flames if she had to. She could be three fourth kind, and forgiving, and accommodating. And she could be one fourth something else. 

Currently working as a Curriculum Developer for English Language and Literature, and a Subject Expert for the National Curriculum Council, Nwa A. Rizvi is also an author and translator published both nationally as well as internationally. Her work primarily focuses on images and experiences within the web of the profound ordinary that surrounds us all. 

Marcos Guinoza is a Brazilian graphic designer and digital artist. His collages are inspired by human feelings like loneliness, melancholy, emotional disturbances, disorientation, and confusion in the face of a seemingly meaningless and increasingly absurd world. He has been influenced by minimalism, Russian suprematism, surrealism, and artists like René Magritte and Edward Hopper, among others.

by Fatima Ijaz

The story of almost recedes
In the night of shade trees.
Once or twice I felt you
stood there waiting 
for me as usual but
it was my fancy. 

Have I ever told you
The night of the strange sorority 
In the party of initiates
I was dressed as a clown but 
It was your thick yellow eye-shadow
around my eyes.  

I stole it from your make-up kit
Because I wanted to be ¾ you. At least
For the night we exchanged cold stares
and I was close to you. 

Fatima Ijaz is based in Karachi, Pakistan and teaches English and Speech at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA). She has studied English at York University, Canada and Eastern Michigan University, USA. She is a contributing editor at Pandemonium Journal. Her book ‘The Shade of Longing and Other Poems’ has recently been published by The Little Book Company.

Marcos Guinoza is a Brazilian graphic designer and digital artist. His collages are inspired by human feelings like loneliness, melancholy, emotional disturbances, disorientation, and confusion in the face of a seemingly meaningless and increasingly absurd world. He has been influenced by minimalism, Russian suprematism, surrealism, and artists like René Magritte and Edward Hopper, among others.

when my cat died, he almost didn’t.
the day before his last he was stronger
than ever, the purr back in his throat and
the happy squint back in his eyes. that is how
i think of my life. how i was almost happy but
then i wasn’t. how we were almost friends 
forever but then we weren’t and how
various boys almost loved me but then
they didn’t. my father was almost my father
but then he wasn’t. the sun almost came up
tomorrow. my therapist says im almost clinical 
but i’m not. i keep my dreams under my eyelids 
and every night they almost come true. 
when i lose the fight with my own mind
tell my mother i almost won.

Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She is also a Fulbright scholar, currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Crossed Genres, Cities+Secrets, Where Are You Press, Rising Phoenix Press, The Noble Gas Quarterly and L’Ephemere Review, and The Aleph Review. She was also a finalist for the inaugural Zeenat Haroon Prize.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

as if it were the aromatic ash 
of a celestial tree, powder of
solemn oaths and scintillation of star-
light even between locked horns— hennaed,
she looks at how the cities written on
her palm are shaped to shelter his heart, how 
the sugar syrup binds semolina, 
cardamom, and saffron— the flame high, mélange
of moti choor sculpted into a globe
of shattered pearls, his hand, a sea, her eye, star.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable Books’ Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart multiple times. Her poetry collections include ‘Kohl and Chalk’ and ‘Baker of Tarifa’. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian, and Urdu, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney’s ‘In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth’. 

Andreas/SurrealGradients is a 23 year old self-taught digital artist. His artworks are an escape into surreal worlds and by the use of photo manipulation, his artworks come to life.
Some of his collections are available on OpenSea.

You Are Not Quite There Yet

by Neha Dsouza

Neha Dsouza is a storyteller who continues to explore the world around her through poetry, books, and other art forms. She can spend hours reading, and ends up losing sense of her time and surroundings. She loves traveling and journaling, and is trying every day to practice Tao.

Scheherezade Junejo was born in 1986 in Karachi. She graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore, in January 2010 with a BFA (Honours) degree. Scheherezade has produced seven solo exhibits, and participated in over 70 group exhibits, both national and international since June 2010. You can read her interview with The Missing Slate for our Spotlight Series here.

by Ananya Sahoo

TW: Sexual assault

I. 

Aren’t broken lips aphrodisiacs? 
It’s date night and I wore your favorite shade of lilac lipstick.
See? It matches my left eye perfectly. 
And Tuesday’s ‘discussion’ is peeping out shyly
From beneath the bed of concealer.
I got drunk on my bruises that night.

II. 

Your hands were so perfect – 
Crests and troughs in all the right places.
The curves of my neck fit into them so snugly
Just like my trembling fingers.
Your love is etched permanently on my back.

You told me I was a princess. 
Whose castle resided between her legs,
Prince Charming had a spare key
And frequented the castle often – my princess, you love our soirees, don’t you? 
I nodded fervently and said the castle belonged to him.

III. 

Ruins can be beautiful, can’t they?

IV. 

There’s a painting of a swan right above your bed.
On nights when my knees hurt
From holding the castle down,
I close my eyes and dream of being whisked away
By those majestic white wings
To a land where my pillows aren’t
stained with mascara tears,
And the lines aren’t blurry– 
But I still see love through a frosted glass. 

V. 

My best friend made me tea with her tears.
She said I was far away in Stockholm.
I laughed and pulled my sleeves over my wrists.
It’s called love, silly –
Not syndrome.
Together in sickness and in health, remember? 
He clasped my hand a little too tightly. 
I smiled through the fog.

Why does love taste like blood?

Ananya Sahoo is a 25-year-old change management analyst from India. When she’s not busy being a corporate slave, she enjoys writing, slam poetry, reading, and playing the piano. She worked as a Director of Outreach for a national level student-run NGO which aimed at educating the youth about taboo issues like sexual abuse, mental health, etc. She has always been passionate about writing and pens down her thoughts in her personal blog.

Maham Noman is a 25 year-old-doctor and self-proclaimed cat lady trying hard to juggle her career with her creative inclinations. A hobbyist photographer as well as poet, Maham was one of the runner-ups in the All Pakistan Poetry Slam 2018. She can be found running around the twin cities with a textbook in one hand and a camera in the other–laces untied, of course.

by Zahra Hamdulay

A tower has two stories. The top floor window depicts a woman wrapped in black. Her hair is ragged and her expression distraught but the most striking thing about her is her wild, piercing cry that shatters the night sky like a wolf at a funeral. Her name is Mad Madonna and she howls at a moon that the audience only sees reflected in the windowpane. The moon is curvaceous and wholesome though I can’t tell if it’s supposed to represent lunacy or romance, but perhaps they overlap. In the window below her on the ground floor,  a man prods the ceiling with a broomstick. That awful, offensive omnipotent noise. Little does he know that she howls for him; as a Catholic, she cannot marry her Protestant lover. Ironically, the howling is reminiscent of a pack of wolves, but Mad Madonna seems trapped in her tower of loneliness. The visual poetry of her costume is striking, with her black funeral attire that mourns a relationship she can never have because of the “dogmas of their different faiths.”

I think about barriers to intimacy. Two people who are told that opposites attract, but always remain two separate individuals with no overlap. They strike up conversations like matches, but there is only friction, no sparks. Each day with the other feels like an effort. Every day, the distance between them grows. Unfortunately, lived experience underscores that the line between physical and emotional chemistry is blurry. One almost always tends to create the illusion of the other. Imagine, then, living with someone under the same roof, always feeling like the other person is just out of reach, even though they are lying right beside you. Your cheek is against their chest and their nose nuzzles your forehead, but after they fall asleep, you stay awake, listening to an asynchronous heartbeat. 

Antonia, the film’s central character and dutch matriarch, is a foil to Mad Madonna because she recognises that physical and emotional needs can be separated. She meets her own emotional needs. She is a person so fulfilled that she does not need many other people for support, besides family and friends. It is as though she pioneers the idea in her village community, and perhaps, for many in the audience. 

II.

Antonia, who returns to the village as a widow with her daughter Danielle, is approached by Farmer Bas, seeking her hand in marriage, most probably as a marriage of convenience. But Antonia revels in her detachment from societal norms just as much as she is a respected member of society. 

Farmer Bas:  Hello. I wanted to have a word.

Antonia:       What about?

Farmer Bas:  About you and me… About marriage.

                      You being a widow and my wife dead.

                      You are a good-looking woman, my sons need a mother.

Antonia:        But I don’t need your sons.

Farmer Bas:  No?

Antonia:        No.

Farmer Bas:  Don’t you want a husband either?

Antonia:       What for?

Shortly after, she says to him, “Some years ago you asked for my hand. You still can’t have my hand. But, you can have the rest. After all these chaste years, I’ve got the urge again. Let’s say once a week?” 

Where is The Woman, begging for commitment? Where is The Woman whose wedding day is the most important day of her life and who dreams about her unborn children after a second date? Antonia lets her primal instincts drive her rather than societal laws, as Freud posited years ago; that a life is built around tension and pleasure. Could a marriage, or at least, a marriage of convenience be avoided if people acknowledged it was simply a legal formality? That it is possible to coexist under the same roof, learn from and love each other, conscious of the choice to leave every single day and yet choosing to wake up next to their partner’s beaming face, as opposed to because they are legally roped to them like a goat to a tree, free to roam a five-mile radius?

III.

Antonia resembles Beauty and the Beast’s Gaston as he marches towards the castle to kill the beast, but holding a shotgun instead of a flaming torch. She sweeps through the village towards a pub in which her granddaughter’s rapist Pitte leans back in his chair and pops open a beer. As she steps in with the rifle, the men sitting at the bar burst into obnoxious laughter until Antonia shoots at the glass next to Pitte, shattering it. The laughter stops. In what might be the biggest power move of the entire film, she shoves him out of the bar with the butt of her rifle. He opens his mouth to explain himself but she doesn’t let him. Instead, she curses him. At once, the men from the bar, almost possessed by her incantation, file out and attack him until he is on his knees, spitting blood.

Years later when Pitte dies, no one bothers asking questions.

It puzzles and amazes me, the way rage can sometimes stem from the pulsating desire to help a situation. To fix hurt with hurt. To let all the bottled-up helplessness of a bystander finally explode into the courage to say how they really feel, to reveal the rifle in their chest nested below their lungs and fire bullets of stifled truths from their tongues. To finally be able to voice ‘you make me feel like I’m not enough to save you’. To be comfortable with the silence that follows.

I’ve heard the shriek of Mad Madonna and recognised her voice, it is something I have heard for years. I’ve heard the Protestant shoving the broomstick into the wall, again and again, to make that awful noise stop. One day I swallowed up my ability to hear. I’ve seen third people that went on to become thirteenth people and fifty-eighth people who all have opinions on the matter, who don’t really understand the situation but pick sides and jump to conclusions. Who sensationalize the headlines. People, like Farmer Bas, who chatter incessantly about how society would respond. Not helping anybody.

I go back to Antonia from time to time to remind myself of the control she holds over her life. I accept how I will not always have control over my own. She cradles my head in her arms through the screen.

Zahra Hamdulay is co-editor of The Missing Slate.

Scheherezade Junejo was born in 1986 in Karachi. She graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore, in January 2010 with a BFA (Honours) Degree. Scheherezade has produced seven solo exhibits, and participated in over 70 group exhibits, both national and international since June 2010. She has contributed work to several fundraisers, charities and auctions for causes such as Art For Education, Covid-19 Relief, and Special Olympics Pakistan. You can read her interview with The Missing Slate for our Spotlight Series here.

by Rohee Shah

‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
– William Butler Yeats

I got 75% in school
My glass is neither
half-empty, nor full

What does it take for me
to be beautiful?

Tiny little beings
live in my head
they have found
their home, 
a happy place

they eat my scalp 
when hungry,
drink the sweat and 
oil off my hair

they excrete at 
particular spaces where 
it’s clean and safe
for them

they move around, 
play, quarrel and fight 
during the day

At night, they must 
be asleep for there is
very little movement 

The constant itching 
and scraping
makes very little 
sanity remain

Life has never been easy for me
I am almost there yet 
I am never really there.

Rohee Shah is a poet, writer, and an educator based out of Ahmedabad, India. She runs an NGO called Tide Foundation. Like any other writer, she strongly believes in the magic that words carry in them. Writing has been her source of love, magic, friendship and support. Most of her pieces are a way to figure out what is going on in her world; they help her make sense of her pain, her joys, her sorrows, and her life.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Having grown up in Houston, Texas with The Menil Collection and the MFAH in her backyard, Marisa was heavily influenced by the Surrealists. Initially a mixed media collage artist, she received her BFA at the University of North Texas. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

An important aspect of photography involves capturing important moments and making memories so we can look back on them later. While this is mostly true, I find that in my own work I want to focus on those moments which might otherwise go unnoticed. Be it street photography, where I capture people candidly going about their day, or documenting life’s more intimate moments in my house or college accommodation, I like to underscore those unexpected glimpses of life that lie within the mundane. 

At the same time, this series is also about how we all see the same things and same spaces quite differently from one another. While I see only a man looking out from his balcony, somebody else envisions him standing in a line of frogs. So this collaboration between me and my friends combines our different perspectives to tell a whole new story.

Ved Murarka is a creative/an artist born and raised in Kolkata, India. He is now a sophomore at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India pursuing a BFA in Film. His work primarily consists of monochrome street photography and occasional forays into videography and filmmaking.

TW: Sexual Abuse

I. 
I don’t check under the bed anymore. 
Did you know evil looked human,
And ate dinner at your table? 
One hand on the cutlery, another on my frill clad thigh,
Is this why kin rhymes with sin? 
‘Blood relation’ is terrifyingly literal. 

II. 
Don’t you know, sweet child? 
You’re my favorite niece.
One lollipop for a secret. 
Little fingers trembled as they clutched
A bundle of candy wrappers.
Swallowing candy was getting harder by the day. 
My first sugar crash–
Remember, sweet child:
Bribes are costly.

III. 
“You’re the apple of my eye,” 
And proceeded to take a bite,
Savoring each one with smiles and reassurances. 
“You’re safe here.” 
Shh, good girls don’t make a sound,
Close your eyes.

IV. 

So I closed my eyes.
Swallowed my protests along with the candy. 
Gathered the wrappers like silent testimony. 

But today, I trapped decades worth of rage,
In a big porcelain bottle, 
And displayed it loudly on the mantelpiece. 
Did I remember? 

To scrub away the ‘me’ from ‘memories’
Three steps forward, two steps back, 
One step forward. One step forward on
Cracked but resilient feet.
Scarred wrists wrapped
Around my bottle of rage,
Tendrils of fire flirting with the glass.

Ananya Sahoo is a 25-year-old change management analyst from India. When she’s not busy being a corporate slave, she enjoys writing, slam poetry, reading, and playing the piano. She worked as a Director of Outreach for a national level student-run NGO which aimed at educating the youth about taboo issues like sexual abuse, mental health, etc. She has always been passionate about writing and pens down her thoughts in her personal blog.

Scheherezade Junejo was born in 1986 in Karachi. She graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore, in January 2010 with a BFA (Honours) degree. Scheherezade has produced seven solo exhibits, and participated in over 70 group exhibits, both national and international since June 2010. You can read her interview with The Missing Slate for our Spotlight Series here.

I always sought solace in three fourths 
You, my fussy toddler would play havoc with my nerves
Me, second-guessing, hoping you’d eat
A bowl of porridge 
A plateful of rice 
A slice of fruit 
An almost round chapatti 
You eating one fourth of anything was never good enough, no
I always aimed at three fourths
Because it reassured me you’d eaten reasonably well 
That as your mother I wasn’t in fact failing

So three fourths invariably became a yardstick of performance 
A self-set goal, which I wanted to achieve 
But what I forgot was this:
What if you had an affinity
towards half, one fourth 
or worse the deceptive two thirds? 
It was something I never considered.
Blinded by the magnetic power of three fourths I carried on
Oblivious, unaware, almost ignorant 
as I tried to please 
a mere fraction 

Snehal Amembal is a full-time mum. Between changing nappies and tolerating tantrums, she writes. Her work primarily focuses on her journey through motherhood. She has an infectious laugh and a very loud mind. She is also a Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease warrior and creates awareness of the condition through her writing. You can find her on Instagram: @momtherhustler

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.

Ananya Sahoo

I.

“Beds are meant to be woken up from, 
Not misused as a sanctuary.” 
Sunlight slices through my window
till my eyes smart.
My pillow smells like dandelions in a faraway mystical land. 
Just five more minutes days weeks. 

II. 

If I squint my eyes hard enough, 
I can squeeze a little serotonin inside my brain. 
If I squint harder and clench my fists, I can stop the bad neurons from firing. 
(You were right, Ma. 
Staying positive is simple.) 
Funnily, the scars on my inner thigh 
resemble a cross.

III. 

Five things you can touch – Sink. Mirror. Faucet. Towel. Water. 
Four things you can see – Toothbrush, floss, bar of soap, trashcan. 
Three things you can hear – Dripping faucet. Faint chatter of the party outside. A tree branch creaking. 
Two things you can smell – Potpourri, Wet Earth.
One thing you can taste – Ashes . 
Zero things you can feel. 
In. Out. In. Out. 

Ananya Sahoo is a 25-year-old change management analyst from India. When she’s not busy being a corporate slave, she enjoys writing, slam poetry, reading, and playing the piano. She worked as a Director of Outreach for a national level student-run NGO which aimed at educating the youth about taboo issues like sexual abuse, mental health, etc. She has always been passionate about writing and pens down her thoughts in her personal blog.

Marcos Guinoza is a Brazilian graphic designer and digital artist. His collages are inspired by human feelings like loneliness, melancholy, emotional disturbances, disorientation, and confusion in the face of a seemingly meaningless and increasingly absurd world. He has been influenced by minimalism, Russian suprematism, surrealism, and artists like René Magritte and Edward Hopper, among others.

İlker Kılıçer lives in İzmir, Turkey. He is a mime and puppeteer who has been engaged in mime art since 2003. He has performed 27 pantomime shows at international theatre festivals. Kılıçer performs puppet shows for both children and grownups, and also organises puppet and mime workshops and practices.

You’ve cut out a hole. You can’t know,
as the dog can’t guess where you went
on the other side of the back door
for four days, though you almost think 
he must, because he noses at your side 
with undoglike delicacy, leans against 
your calves just hard enough to intimate 
he knows. The first day you scrape up 
energy, you gather polyfill, scissors, 
and white thread, while the dog trots 
close behind, eyes fixed on the torn toy 
you carry, padding along from sewing kit 
in the closet to your chair by the lamp.
Then you stumble sideways. Part of you 
falls with your surgeon into sterile glare.

You float beside her as she makes 
slices in your chest and slides in lights,
camera and pincers; you see her stroke 
the left lung, limp in its fleshy hole, 
lumpy with bronchi, smooth it and send in 
a robot’s snout, watch its tiny teeth 
bite and seal the top while the right lung 
pants beside, and the heart thumps below 
like the tail of a hopeful dog, trusting
as she pulls the cancer out and the needle
dips and dips, and then you are
not whole exactly but the much chewed
bear with rag legs reattached the dog
snatches and shakes and shakes and
carries again into the living room.

Kristin Camitta Zimet is a poet and a surreal photographer in the United States. Her poems are imagistic and her art is metaphorical. Her poetry can be found in her book ‘Take in My Arms the Dark’, and in journals and anthologies in seven countries.

Marcos Guinoza is a Brazilian graphic designer and digital artist. His collages are inspired by human feelings like loneliness, melancholy, emotional disturbances, disorientation, and confusion in the face of a seemingly meaningless and increasingly absurd world. He has been influenced by minimalism, Russian suprematism, surrealism, and artists like René Magritte and Edward Hopper, among others.

Yusra Amjad

in what language do you suggest we write Pakistan?
for seventy five years, seventy five tongues have failed to unite Pakistan.

bengal was already bitter when hafeez jallandri penned the qaumi tarana
did he churn out three quintets in farsi just to spite (East) Pakistan?

but you don’t speak persian, you just sang it back at the sky every morning
weren’t we all true little patriots, starched and uniformed in upright Pakistan?

hindi was theirs, punjabi too common, bengali only good for fishermen to gossip in
which of you would deny that only urdu can be the language of erudite Pakistan?

like ninetythree percent of the population, the Quaid could barely speak urdu
but oh you should have heard his Queen’s English when he was trying to ignite Pakistan.

its composition far preceding its lyrics, the anthem was wordless music for years.
an instrumental played at every state event. imagine the sound of a quiet Pakistan. 

Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She is also a Fulbright scholar, currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Crossed Genres, Cities+Secrets, Where Are You Press, Rising Phoenix Press, The Noble Gas Quarterly and L’Ephemere Review, and The Aleph Review. She was also a finalist for the inaugural Zeenat Haroon Prize.

Andreas/SurrealGradients is a 23 year old self-taught digital artist. His artworks are an escape into surreal worlds and by the use of photo manipulation, his artworks come to life.
Some of his collections are available on OpenSea.

by Afshan Shafi

I have always seen it so;
The mind in a silver bowl
At once uninhabitable and
Avid for fleece, bridle, or
Some scientific flummoxing.

When the pandemic’s long red waves
First began to bellow, 
I drew out a key-
An amberous-gray fish-
And swept the mind’s 
Puzzling muscle
To one such bowl
In the midst of sweet green fields.

I left it there to age.

Now, if memory permits one to visit it,
It lies, there, steeled
With incredible tessellations,
At once pink and sanguine-
Like an older woman with the hair
Of an autumn river-

Time does not give it permission 
To pace or ulcerate.
Spared of the dance of the body
It has spread it’s girth.
It is becoming
A careless young planet,
A nocturne without sound
A thought clean of reason.

Afshan Shafi lives in Lahore and has studied English Literature and International Relations at The University of Buckingham and Webster Graduate School London. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Wales, Blackbox Manifold, Flag + Void, Luna Luna, Clinic, and 3am magazine. She has also served as a poetry editor for The Missing Slate and as an assistant editor for GoodTimes Magazine. Her prose has appeared in Grazia (Pakistan), The News on Sunday, Libas Now, OK! (Pakistan), and Daily Times (Pakistan). She is a senior contributing editor at the Aleph Review and a founding editor at Pandemonium Journal.

Marisa S White is best known for seamlessly stitching multiple photographs together, weaving her own personal narrative through surrealistic and fantastical imagery. Marisa has received numerous accolades for her art, has exhibited across the US and in Europe, and is collected internationally. Her work was recently featured at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. She currently resides in Colorado with her husband of 10+ years, whom she fondly refers to as Captain Awesome, and their two fur babies.