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gemini wahhaj creative nonfiction august 2025

When my daughter was in daycare, I wanted to let everyone know about Eid. I bought dates, teamed up with another mom, asked to go to a class and share what Eid was with the class. I read a Bengali folk tale for children from a children’s book.  Then, we lit candles, and the smoke alarm went off. It was her third year in daycare — a time when my daughter was falling off the end of the world. In her first year, she was happy. At first, she didn’t know the language, so she would wait the whole day until she saw me, then run towards me and burst into tears.

 But the third year, it was the bullying. She wanted to be white. She drew herself white with blonde, straight hair and blue eyes. When a friend bleached his hair white, she kept asking him questions. Another friend and I locked eyes. We both knew what was going on in her mind. At that time, I asked many friends what to do. I asked my classmates who then referred me to other moms who also spoke to me about what children of color face in school at a young age and how to deal with it. So much figuring out, how to fit in, how to make things better for my daughter — a child growing up in America. 

“I sacrifice so much for her. Why doesn’t she understand how loved she is?” I said to my husband. “I don’t even brush my hair!”

“Why don’t you brush your hair? Why do you look like that? Maybe if you dressed nicely, she would look up to you.”

In the end, this was the strategy I chose, which seems strange to me now. I’m not the same person. I dressed up in shalwar kamiz with the gold earrings my mother had given me. I also wore a teep on my forehead.

 I went to pick up my daughter.

“What’s that on your head?” a child asked, pointing.

“Hush,” the teacher said, as if what I had on my head was something shameful.

I brought teeps for all the girls as gifts. I went to Bangladesh in the summer, and I brought back bangles and little cloth dolls to give away. We watched Hindi movies on a VCR, and I dressed my daughter in gaudy dresses, jewelry, teep, so she would have her own standard of beauty, her own role models, her own cheap, cheesy way of being feminine. 

The atmosphere among girls at that age in America is toxic. Girls watch Disney movies and dress and think of themselves as Disney princesses. She didn’t watch TV. She didn’t know anything the other girls were talking about, so they excluded her. But also, the clownish racist exclusion of someone with dark skin and curly hair, and adoration of another girl with white skin seems outlandish to even write about. The teacher said, “There is no racism here.” Of course. So, we watched these movies so my daughter would be able to join in the conversation and fit in. My professor explained that at this age, girls are arranged in hierarchies according to the status of the moms — like a hive around the queen bee. I scheduled playdates, threw parties, positioned us as a family in the hive.

Another dad with a daughter in an older class suggested bending the princess trope, introducing her to other versions of fairy tales, so we read The Paper Bag Princess and watched Kiki’s Delivery Service at his recommendation. (I really admired a lot of these fractured, fairy tale picture books and still love them.)

I surrounded myself with allies and we survived.

I don’t do that anymore. I don’t want to share, to be known, accepted. I write fiction rather than essays because what I have to say is not welcome. Even in my stories, I want to establish a faraway voice at a remove. It seems so long ago, the earnestness, the frenzy of wanting to be known, to explain. I would be embarrassed by the me of that time.

I don’t enjoy being in these spaces or the ways in which I have to compromise, grovel, demean myself to be in the room. In 2014, Obama had iftar in the White House. Many Muslims attended, gleeful, while Gaza was being bombed, with full support from Obama and the Senate. I asked one of them online why they would go to such an event, and they mumbled something about making space for Muslims. During the Ramadan one year while I was a student at Princeton, Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq. All the years that I have lived in the US — first as an international student, then as a mom, and an employee — have left me wandering the halls alone during Ramadan and Eid. I associate Ramadan and Eid now with silence, a complete erasure in our schools and places of work, with the added bonus of a bombing campaign somewhere.  

Now it is Eid again. My daughter is in college. Sick, I asked for leave from work. I asked to teach online. While negotiating, I realized it’s Eid. Every year, I either have to take the day off as a personal day, have my children miss school, or come to work, and just go about quietly pretending nothing is going on.

I am an atheist. 

I thought I would send an email out to everyone at work, wish them Eid Mubarak. Just to let them know. Then I asked myself, “Why? What does it matter when countries are being bombed?”


Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025) and the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13
Books, Fall 2023). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third
Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other magazines. You can find her at GeminiWahhaj.com.

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Moudi sbeity poetry august 2025

after Benjamin Netanyahu,

United States Congress, July 24, 2024


In America, a murderer receives a standing ovation.

Meanwhile, bodies tally against the ground faster

than we can count.

I can’t quite decide what is more disturbing;

the chilling sound of applause cheering genocide,

or the large-scale catastrophe scorching the world.


It’s difficult to hope. It’s difficult to still believe in

our deserved forgiveness.


But I return to that soft and tender place in me that

reaches beyond anger. I return, again, to the wide open

grief stretched before us like a prayer rug. Not just for

the violence, but for the ineffable conditions that create

hardened cruelty in the hearts of the few, and the

unnerving ignorance shielding empathy from the many.


Towards what end do we hope to arrive? The only land

we get to own is the mapped terrain between first gasp

and final whimper. Nothing else is truly ours. Not even

this perennial breath we’ve been given.


What then? After your clapping victory.

What will you do with the terror in your heart?


Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American poet and transpersonal therapist, and the author of the forthcoming books Want A World (Fernwood Press, 2026) and Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press, 2026). In a previous life, Moudi co-owned and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. They call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home. Find them on Instagram at @moudi.sbeity and on Substack at moudisbeity.substack.com.

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Patricia Kusumaningtyas poetry august 2025

the night comes for us,

when mercenaries

scan palm leaves

for drops of blood

of martyrs. martyrs who

write poems about

the living. martyrs

left dead to the

pulses of the solo river

without a sound.

the night comes for us

as suharto flies turbo jet

bullets through the sky

as if timor could never

rest and if they rest then

kissinger cuts his molars

in washington restlessly

calling to some

lockheed factory in louisiana,

flat rate

express delivery

to indonesia.

the family of deer in the

presidential palace graze

on dirty money reserves

turbo jet bulleting from

the cayman islands.

the night comes for us.

the sparrows

silent witness

silent extrajudicial

bullets upon our dissent.

every worker is a fugitive under martial law.

the sparrows

continue their flight.

the night comes for us.

even in death

kissinger never

lets go of his choking hands.

if night surrenders

to moonlight,

we will hear the martyrs speak.



Patricia Kusumaningtyas is a tech worker and film/music writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their poetry and prose have been published in Discount Guillotine, Fruitslice, Major 7th Magazine, and Dead End Zine.

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.Chisaraokwu. flash fiction july 2025

In the Great Room of the mansion his father’s father built with the purse the colonialists paid him for his service in the first war, my Papa, dressed in full regalia, his favorite pipe snug between his lips, motions the visitor to join him at the table. Papa, a shrewd-minded military man with a penchant for stout and three-fingers whiskey on the rocks, had successfully commandeered a ragtag troop into battle over the amply equipped rebels and won. Three times, officially. Unofficially, ten times. When he demanded retirement after achieving the rank of General, the President was so distraught he named Papa the first and only Field Marshal in our nation’s history.

Above Papa’s head, the fan whirls a frantic hum into the room. Sweat builds across the visitor’s brow despite the simple white and silver agbada he is wearing without head covering. He removes a pale red handkerchief from his pocket, dabs his eyes — avoiding Papa’s — and folds it in his hands. Papa daftly moves his pipe to the other corner of his mouth. The visitor shifts in his seat and licks his lips. He ignores the glass of water before him, his leg quivering beneath the table. Papa eyes the visitor patiently, swirling the ice cubes in his glass of whiskey to shapelessness. A passing police siren joins the fan’s hum.

The visitor, not much older than Papa, has the lazy demeanor of a lousy crook whose sole talent is to steal stolen things from those who have already committed the crime. The type to boast of his feigned bounty while dribbling palm wine from his lips, staining his shirt. The kind our people dismiss until necessary. A scar from his left ear to his chin assaults his otherwise unremarkable face. His scent of malt, sweat, and menthol cigarettes fills the Great Room, invades my lungs. Papa is testing him.

Papa breaks the silence with a joke meant to insult the visitor. The visitor laughs loudly, at first, then chuckles as if he understands nuance. Papa knows the laughter is false, but he indulges him. This, after all, is the way men are with my father: they love him and fear him at once, show all their cards while desperately trying to convince him that they have no cards at all.

“Adanne,” I recall Papa saying to me while we hunted deer, “Not everything we do is about right or wrong. Rather, it is about hierarchies of power and powerlessness. Know where you stand.”

If my mother had her way today, I would be with her at the market or sipping tea with wives and daughters of military men. But I find solace in Machiavelli and Dante, the speeches of Azikiwe, the discourse of men. Papa never discourages it, indulges his first-born’s proclivities. Gives me seat at his table, always. Permits me to speak at will. To the chagrin of his peers, though they’d never show it. I have learned secrets in the Great Room — its high ceilings and oversized furniture conceal nothing, expose everything.

Today, I sense something amiss. I do not speak. My hands press into my lap. Waiting. After the briefest of exchanges, of which no one outside this room will ever know, the visitor rises from the table, walks past my chair, and brushes my shoulder with a single finger. His touch lingering long enough to brand me in the manner of old men, from the old days. This done in the same manner as in the stories my mother used to tell me when I was small, before I thought them too childish to remember.

“Nne,”Papa says, “Please show our visitor to the door. Eh-heh, you’ll be going to his place next Tuesday to pick up a gift for me.”

“Yes, Papa.”

I, too, rise, joining the men.

The visitor smiles, this time his gapped teeth showing, his tongue at the edge of his dry lips. He follows me to the door, bows his head, then leaves. I won’t soon forget the smell of him.


Photo by Chriselda Photography

.CHISARAOKWU. (she/her) is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet artist. Drawing inspiration from her Igbo heritage, quantum physics, indigenous healing practices, and the natural world, her poetry weaves archives, film, and collage to explore memory in the African diaspora. Published in literary and academic journals, .CHISARAOKWU. has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center and more. Learn more about her practice at www.chisaraokwu.com, and you can find her on instagram at naijabella.

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kimberly nao personal essay june 2025

I never had a crush on David Lee Roth, but he had a crush on me.  And, he sang a song about it. You remember the video. David dressed as a tour guide leading tourists through sunny California, dancing around bikini clad girls singing, “I wish they all could be California girls…” On the beach, at a movie studio, so many girls in bikinis and with big Aqua Net stiff hair teased up much higher than David’s golden locks. He just loves these California girls. And well, that’s me. But wait…

There are no brown-skinned girls in this video. Tan, yes. Brown? No. And my hair? My hair is actually too big to be teased up to look big. My hair is long almost down my back, but it’s thick and frizzy and more like Diana-Ross-Central-Park-in-the-rain concert hair than bikini-clad-blonde-on-Venice-Beach hair. So, am I a California girl?

In fact, it wasn’t David Lee Roth’s song anyway. It was the Beach Boys’ song. They’re the original ones who loved California girls. As long as they had blonde-bobs-on-the-beach hair. Yes, bikinis and tanned bods. Not the 80s, but women in the 60s doing the jerk while the band defines the quintessentially endless summer sound and California lifestyle. And there are no brown skinned girls.

There’s cute, perky surfer girl Gidget. Not Sally Field Gidget. But Sandra Dee Gidget. The one that personified the California vibe in the 60s. The one that made everyone who wasn’t a Californian want to move to California and buy a surfboard and live on a Malibu beach for the summer. And it was always summer. Blonde Gidget. Is it her? Is Gidget the culprit? Is she the one that made every media image of a California girl thereafter blonde, tan, and bikini clad?

Seriously there are so many California blondes. Not just any blondes but the ones that defined the “California girl.” The Bionic Woman. I did not have a crush on David Lee Roth, but I did have a crush on the Bionic Woman. She was blonde and beautiful and could rip the yellow pages in half. And she had a bionic ear that could hear across long distances. I mean miles. She would push a blonde lock behind her ear and listen.  Apparently bionic ears can hear for miles, but they cannot hear through hair. I couldn’t push a lock of hair behind my ear. Well, I could but it wouldn’t stay there. My hair was not tame. It was wild and did what it wanted to do. The Bionic Woman was indeed a California girl. She lived in Ojai. You can’t get more California than that. Unless, of course, you lived in Malibu.

The Bionic Woman’s boyfriend was the Six Million Dollar Man. The Ken to Jamie Somers’s Barbie. The Six Million Dollar Man was played by Lee Majors who was married to the very blonde Farrah Fawcett. Another quintessentially California girl (even though she was from Texas).  Fawcett was Jill Monroe — the blonde on Charlie’s Angels with feathered hair bouncing in the wind as she chased down criminals. She ran the way boys run when their peers say, “You run like a girl.” Farrah was the breakout star of that show. And yes, you can find pics of the ultra-feminine Fawcett trying to look like a tomboy skateboarding Dogtown style down the street. But more importantly, there is the poster — Farrah, sitting in front of a striped Mexican blanket wearing a red bikini, one knee up, one leg down, head cocked back in a smile that shows all of her white, perfectly straight teeth. It is very California, and it is said to be the best-selling poster ever. I did not look like Farrah Fawcett. I tried to cut and feather my own bangs and ended up with an afro on my forehead.

Maybe that’s when I stopped trying to be the California girl. Yeah, I was born and raised in L.A. and went to school so close to the beach that the boys would surf every morning before making their way to class. I said “grody” and “gag me with a spoon” and “groovy.” But I wasn’t Gidget, or Farrah Fawcett or Lindsay Wagner. I wasn’t Pamela Anderson in another red bathing suit saving lives on a Malibu Beach. I wasn’t Angelyne or Malibu Barbie. I wasn’t even Bo Derek, hair adorned in cornrows, running in slow motion on a misty seashore.

I was the brown-skinned, frizzy-haired girl. Born of a Japanese American mother and Black father. My Japanese grandmother was Nissei, first generation born in San Francisco, California in 1913. My paternal grandparents came to California from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My parents met in the Bay Area, and I was born and raised by my single mom in L.A. We did not live near the beach. We did not live in a sprawling, ranch-style home like all those blonde Brady girls. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood both affectionately and derisively called the Jungle. With its grassy lawns and abundant foliage, it was the perfect playground for bike riding, hula hooping, sock ball, and tree climbing. But the crack-laden 80s and 90s made it resemble more the urban hellscape of Boyz in the Hood than the dreamy paradise of The Endless Summer.

But this, too, is a California story. Better than the glossy, glamorized image projected on television, this California is real. It’s brown-skinned and frizzy-haired, and mixed-race, and multicultural, and queer, and it’s me. I’m it. California is after all named after me. Not as if  David Lee Roth had a crush on me but instead, where the name comes from. According to the book, California Place Names, “[t]he term originally referred to a mythical land of Amazons, ruled by the beautiful black queen Calafia, as described in the Spanish novel, Las Sergas de Esplandian.” It’s me!

The city of my birth, Los Angeles, was inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and was founded by a band of 44 pobladores who settled the area in the 1700s. These pobladores were of Spanish, Indigenous, and African origin. Brown-skinned. Pio Pico, the first governor of California under Mexican rule, designated Los Angeles the state’s capital. Yes, the Pico that the boulevard is named for, and he was mestizo, mixed with African, Indigenous, and Spanish ancestry. Brown-skinned.

The bouncy, blonde surfer girl version of California leaves out the Chinese immigrants who worked in the Gold Rush, the Japanese farmers who were later interned in concentration camps, the Mexicans and Native Americans who were here before the state was annexed to the U.S. The African Americans who brought jazz and soul and hip hop to waft along the Santa Ana winds with the Beach Boys and Van Halen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It left out the non-blondes who made the state what it was and is today. And by the way, surfing was invented by brown-skinned Polynesians, and Malibu is a Chumash word meaning “it’s loud over there” in reference to the waves of the unruly sea. Wild like my untamed hair.

I want to take a black crayon to plain white paper and draw a thickly bordered square. Above it, I want to draw a triangle and give the square a roof to make a house I never lived in. I want to take a brick red crayon and draw a rectangle for a chimney. And a gray crayon to draw a curlicue of smoke coming from the chimney I never had. I want to take a yellow crayon and draw a circle for the sun and a sky-blue crayon to outline perfectly fluffy clouds. It will be the home I never had but for some reason the one I always drew at school when my teachers asked me to draw a house. I imagine it on a perfectly manicured California street. Under it, I want to  pick up a black marker like a French teacher and write “Ceci n’est pas une maison.” This is not a house. Like that painting of a very realistic, very idealized pipe under which Magritte wrote “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Because it wasn’t a pipe, it was a painting of a pipe. And this drawing wasn’t my house. And that California was not California at all.


Kimberly Nao was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she works as a professor of education at Mount Saint Mary’s University. She is the founder of Nao & Associates, a DEI and antiracism consulting agency. Her current projects include integrating contemplative practices in education, helping organizations engage in antiracist practices, and researching the historical landscape of Black Los Angeles. As a certified yoga and mindfulness facilitator, Kimberly believes that self-awareness and compassion for others leads to social transformation.

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bobby marie flash fiction june 2025

Hey, big sister. Just my weekly report. So, I met someone.

It was Sunday afternoon, a time when Johannesburg, but for a brief moment, is its beautiful best.

“How quiet the sun sets,” he said.

We shared the bench, just sitting, watching the children play in the park. Children and mothers like us, so far away from home.  It was how our conversation began as the sun dipped into a fiery horizon — the sky sprayed with colours of gold dust over the mine dumps.

The golden glow softened our words. We exchanged stories — he left home; I left home.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because home had become impossible.”

“Yes?” he replied.

“Maybe one day we won’t need to cross borders to find happiness.”

 He laughed. I liked the way he laughed, a sense of sadness in his eyes.

I asked him to take my picture.

“It’s to send to my sister,” I explained.

He laughed again. “Are you not afraid that I will take more than your picture?”

And to quickly assuage the hesitancy of my response, he asked, “And will you take mine?” He passed me his phone; I took his picture. We scrolled down each other’s screens and laughed at how we imagined each other, such happiness in our eyes. I felt an intimacy when our fingers accidentally touched. A feeling of warmth.

In the excitement of our meeting, we did not exchange numbers when we parted. Then the light faded and so did he, into the Johannesburg shadows, a cold Jozi night.

That night, wrapped in blankets in my tiny room, I kept looking at my phone. Will we meet again? Johannesburg is such a lonely place, alone.

Bye, love.

Your little sister.

 

Bobby Marie is a South African living  in Johannesburg, . He has been a worker and community activist. He is currently writing a memoir, re-membering  his life in the liberation struggle in South Africa and the struggle of his ancestors as ” coolies” from South India. 

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sabyasachi roy poetry june 2025

Start small:

pour a glass of wine like you mean it.

Toast to the black dog pawing through snow,

leaving tracks that look like hieroglyphs

for “almost.”


Outside, the trees lean conspiratorially.

Inside, the cat reads your mind

and knocks a glass off the counter.

You laugh—

but it sounds wrong, like broken glass,

or an old cassette tape unraveling.


The news came in last week:

Colleen’s gone.

Julie’s gone.

You’re still here,

dancing to a Beatles record

because grief won’t let you sit still.

The groove is a time machine;

the lyrics are a curse.


At some point,

you’ll stand on the porch,

watching a hydrangea fight

for its life in the wind,

and think:

This is survival.

This is all it ever was.


Sabyasachi Roy is an academic writer, poet, artist, and photographer. He contributes craft essays to Authors Publish as a guest writer. His poetry has been published in The Broken Spine, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Dicey Brown, The Potomac, and other print and online magazines. He has written several essays on wildlife and culture, and he is a published photographer with a cover image in Sanctuary Asia. Find him on EyeEm at sabyasachi13 and on instagram at pensoftworks.

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dana I. Hunter poetry june 2025

From high-end restaurants

to invitation-only shops. Department

store spies have shadowed me.


An outcast in exquisite malls

featuring items they assume are

beyond this minority’s grasp.


Pure judgment in their eyes

I sense when I arrive. It’s always

‘that look,’ and thought process.


“Who let you in?”

“How can you afford to walk through

these doors?”

“Wrong color, wrong place.”


I have received this slight

despite my talent or intellect.

Snide compliments behind smiles.


It’s a look I have witnessed

and learned to ignore from racists,

and elitists who still believe in ‘Jim Crow’

laws.


I am well aware of my skin tone

and the unwarranted bias produced.

I belong where my life takes me

your opinion is not invited to attend.


Dana I. Hunter (she/her) holds the title of Top Poet in the NAMI NJ: Dara Axelrod Expressive Arts Poetry Contest and has been featured in Heather Stivison’s Ekphrasis! Poets Respond to Art in the Gallery. She was featured at Pleiades Gallery in NYC and has been published in table/FEAST Literary Magazine, The National & International Goddess Anthology 2024, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, and Open Minds Quarterly. She has a B.A. in Mass Communications and resides in New Jersey.

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trycent milimo poetry may 2025

The sky is cracked

The stars are not hiding

And the Earth suffers it all.


The moon shrivels to a sickle

I’ve been nibbling it every night

Now the constellations are my clock.


All the trees dry their clothes

Only the fig tree shares its shade

My garden has grown into a desert.


Heaven has sailed far from me

My Earth is sinking like a boat

Wind lifts dust to the mountaintop.


Everything that belongs to me scatters

Soya beans, sorghum, bananas blow away

My world has been swept away by wind.


Heart’s Desert

You sink in sands of sorrow

Drenching all chambers with drought.


The well is far from my workplace

I’m drowning with a dry throat.


I dream of downpours pounding the dam

But rise to the reality of roughness. 


Thirst has burnt the building

The blaze blocks all exits.


Your desert slithers like fire

You burn in a sea of sand.


Trycent Milimo is a Zambian based rising author of poetry, fiction and children’s books. His writing is featured in two Sotrane Publishers anthologies — Centennial Reflection: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Kenneth Kaunda, and the TriState anthology, Reflection on Political, Economic and Cultural Independence in Post-Colonial Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He is the 2024 regional winner of the inaugural Bridgette James online poetry competition. The poem was then featured in the PENNED IN RAGE online journal. He is the 2024 third runner up for Zambian Best Poet Valentine poetry competition and was shortlisted for Zambian Arts Publishing House Valentine poetry competition.

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noel munguia-moreno poetry may 2025

For Neida


What is black, white, and red all over if not checkered

flannel and blood: the Chola enclosure.

Forgive me, Father, for I have survived despite cops’

best efforts to send me into that good night.

Two times now, I’ve gone running with pigs at my back, hoping,

wishing, my little siblings see me get back.

I was in the fields fighting those red clowns, but in

my heart of hearts, I’m not truly down.

I ripped off their paisley bandanas, all

for the girl who called me ‘mana.

Por mi culpa por mi culpa por mi gran culpa, the

navy beads on my neck, son mi disculpa,

I pray for a rider, the ones with polished metal, to

take my siblings far away to something betta’,

I rebel, I rebel to stay in the house tonight,

there’s a war on the streets, and I have been asked to fight.

My mother won’t look at me, and my father’s gone cold,

and the only gift I’ve gotten was not to grow old,

I turned fourteen, grabbed a switchblade, dark lip liner,

and concealer to hide my new shiner.

Cordero de dios, que quitas el pecado del mundo,

nos dejastes en esa casa y eso no fue justo

The only love I know is from the end of a belt,

and my brother and my sister don’t know the hand they been dealt.

So hear out my bargain as it stays between you and me,

the three dots on my cheek mean the holy trinity

Keep me from losing breath while I run on the gravel,

and send us an angel with nimbus and dazzle,

for you my lord I’ll lay down the navy

if you keep my parents away from us babies.


Noel Munguia-Moreno is a first-year poetry MFA candidate at Rutgers-Newark where he teaches Intro to Creative Writing. He spends too much of his time thinking about which coffee to drink or laughing at horror movies. He writes of heritage, the physical land and environment, and our individual myths. Find him on Instagram at noel_fromhell.

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hossein nazari poetry april 2025

I teach​ poetry to my students at university.


            I tell them all about

                        Eliot’s objective correlative

                        Keats’s negative capability

                        Coleridge’s organic unity


            I make sure they understand

                        rhyme, rhythm, prosody

                        alliteration, allusion, apostrophe

                        metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche

                        imagery, symbolism, hyperbole

                        enjambment, anaphora, blah blah blah


            I teach them 

                        all that I’ve been taught

                        by my poetry professors

            and they seem happy!

I teach​ poetry to my students
but      

what I don’t teach them is that


none of this stuff makes great poets
or real poetry!


that to become a poet

you need to have had your home
            stolen from you

            your dreams confiscated,

            your hopes held hostage


you need to have heard

            the cacophony of the Merkava

            the bellowing of the bulldozer

to have appreciated the irony
            when your ancestral olive trees
            became charcoal
you need to have heard

            the onomatopoeia

                        in the roar of the rocket
                        in the bomb’s boom
                        to have spotted the alliteration in

                        “we will waste you in the womb!”


To write poetry
you need to have seen
            your brother blown to pieces

you need to have spotted
            your sister’s curly hair
            under a mountain of rubble
            to have removed her teddy bear
            from her loosening embrace

            to have wiped blood clots
            off her face


you need to have seen
            tearless mothers
            identifying their sons

            one after another
            in mass graves

            fathers

            rocking their pale princesses to sleep

                        fast, sound, deep!

you need to have known

            what it feels like

            to write your name
            on your small limbs

            so they may identify you

            when you become unidentifiable
you need to have learned

            how to swallow
            the sight of your best friend’s
            charred body
            to get used to the word “gone”

                           one
                                       by
                                                one.


To be a poet
you need to have seen this
            known this
                        felt this
with every cell in your body
and that is ​why
                         Palestine

has so many great poets.



Forgive me, my students!

I have lied
                and lied
                             and I am ashamed of myself.


Hossein Nazari is an Assistant Professor of English literature, a translator, and poet. He writes poetry in English and Persian and has translated poems between the two languages. His academic articles on English literature, including on such poets as W. B. Yeats, Czesław Miłosz, Robert Frost, John Milton, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath have appeared in many prestigious international journals. Hossein’s poetry explores the themes of displacement, exile, loss, home(lessness), memory, identity, and nostalgia.

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eric braude poetry april 2025

University of Cape Town, 1966

 

Not six feet from me,

Bobby Kennedy,

about two countries 

settled by the Dutch, British,

 

one went astray—

South Africa, I heard.

 

When I settled in America,

anti-apartheid meetings thrilled  me—

injustice anywhere is injustice

everywhere scrawled on walls.

 

Now I know The Talk,

of men who produce a video—

a black man running from their guns—

as “evidence” that shooting him

 

was justified.

Kennedy’s strayed country

(I looked it up)

was not South Africa.

 

Uprising

We felt South Africa from our feet, 

toes browned by common dust,

for all that we knew 

we knew by raw sole.


Worn paths among bush,

our quiet dread of snakes,

the hard reddish soil, 

rose through our loins. 


Avocado trees crept low,

branches for cradles. There,

when off our feet, we hung,

chatting till the sun blew out.


Durban 1965

Alan Paton, a writer, led South Africa’s Liberal Party.


Brylcreemed, he scowls,

invoking The Almighty. 


One Man One Vote.

The government threatens


to take him down 

to solitary the instant


he slips from fame abroad. 

Two men in hats and well-


pressed suits, backs to speaker, 

shunt from listener


to listener, as if collecting

in a church—big one’s notepad


open for interrogations, small one

kneeling with his massive apparatus,


taking frontal flashbulb photos. I think 

I’m followed home.


Eric Braude grew up in South Africa. He won the 27th annual Eagle-Tribune/Robert Frost Foundation Spring Poetry Contest and wrote the front matter poem for the anthology Songs from the Castle’s Remains. His poetry has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Constellations, Apple Valley Review, J Journal. I-70 Review, Panoplyzine, Book of Matches, Frost Meadow Review and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Eric is a computer science professor at Boston University.

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stephen barile poetry april 2025

When cousin Primo came home

From the Viet Nam War,

I was in my junior year

At Roosevelt High School.

The same high school he attended

Two years earlier, kicked out

A week before graduation

For smoking a cigarette.

He enlisted that summer,

Otherwise going to jail 

Was a real probability. 

He was sent to Boot Camp 

And Germany that first year.

The Army quickly determined

He was jungle-scout material,

Lead man in a three-man squad

Sent to the Viet Nam war.

He was shot five times,

The other two were killed.

Four bullets in the torso,

Shot once in the head,    

He was given up for dead.

A surgeon at a MASH hospital

Found him on a stretcher,

Put a fiberglass plate 

In his head under his scalp

To cover the path of the bullet.

The day that I saw him

He was in my mother’s kitchen

Wearing a hat to cover the wound.

He lifted the hat

Revealing a wide pink scar 

The entire length of his skull

Growing his brown hair to conceal.

He never wore a hat before.

I reeled from the sight,

Wanted to cry for him,

That would have been un-manly.

He chortled a sardonic laugh.

One-hundred percent disabled,

He would never work again

Or lift anything heavy. 

I also envisioned my fate

There in my mother’s kitchen,

A dilemma similar to Primo’s.

A dumb kid from the neighborhood

Unready for the likelihood  

Of being drafted at age 18

And unable to vote until 21.     


Stephen Barile is an award-winning poet from Fresno, California and a Pushcart Prize nominee. He attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. His poems have been anthologized, and published in numerous journals, both print and on-line. He taught writing at Madera College, and CSU Fresno

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rita balogun short story march 2025

Sola Adebayo lingered in her bedroom to avoid her family. As Brent Faiyaz crooned in her ears, she watched the ceiling fan swirl into blurriness and smelled dinner creeping into her room, making its way to her nose. Sola was ready to live on her own. Her mother nagging her to pick up the clothes on the bathroom floor and both parents inquiring about her whereabouts were no longer things she wanted to deal with. She wanted to be in her own space, to be free and spread her wings. She thought about what she would do if she had her own place: walk around naked, let her small, saggy breasts flop with abandon, blast Burna Boy, dance on top of the couch like a madwoman, have a pint of salted caramel ice cream for dinner without anyone judging her. That was the way she wanted to live.

Tonight, Tina stood over a hot stove, preparing a meal that reminded her of home — fufu, spicy tomato and okra stew with assorted meats, suya, and dodo. Fragrant spices and the smell of stockfish left a permanent stench around the house. When Sola was growing up, she hated bringing her school friends over to her home because it reeked of African spices and goat meat. Sola preferred sleepovers at her White friends’ houses because their homes smelled like fresh baked cookies; their parents never cackled loudly into the phone; and their siblings didn’t act like fools. Her friends had normal homes.

“Oya! Food dey ready!” Tina shouted. Her voice was as clear as day even through Sola’s loud music. Sola paused her R&B playlist, removed the AirPods from her ears and went into the dining area.

Sam, her father, was seated at the table, reading glasses hanging from his bulbous nose as he flipped through the newspaper. Sam was a tall, hefty man with a protruding belly full of pounded yam and Guinness beer. There was a burn scar on his left forearm marking the spot where hot water was accidentally poured on him as a child. His dark, shiny head was completely bald, hair having escaped him once he reached his mid-thirties.  Sola could never relate to girls who had good relationships with their fathers. Sam was an old school Nigerian man who believed he was meant to be the breadwinner and dictate how the house should run. He believed he was responsible for providing for the house and guiding his family while the wife did domestic work and the children obeyed and listened to the parents.

Sola sat across from her dad, who continued flipping through his paper. Her sister, Chima, strode in and sat next to Sola. She wore an oversized faded black t-shirt with J Cole’s face on it and black leggings, her blond box breads in a messy bun. Chima had rich, dark skin that was fresh and clear thanks to her genes and her religious skincare routine. Her doe-like brown eyes were framed by wispy lash extensions. Her gap-tooth smile was slightly yellow and crooked, a flaw she was insecure about. Tina would always reassure her that her gap was a sign of beauty in Nigeria, but Chima couldn’t see it. In America, her gap was a deformity.

Without the assistance of anyone, Tina balanced dishes of food in both arms, setting them down at the center of the table. A bowl of oily, spicy stew with an array of meats swimming inside. A greasy plate of fried plantains with a paper towel underneath to capture excess oil. Well-seasoned beef on kabob sticks with sliced cucumbers on the side. Individually saran-wrapped, pounded yams on a serving dish. In front of each chair there were already plates, tumblers, and small bowls of water for washing their hands. Sam slapped his paper down and lunged for the serving spoon, piling his plate with fufu, dodo, spicy stew with shaki, fish, and chicken drums. The others silently piled their plates with food.

Sam rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, dunked his hand into the bowl of water, and tore himself a piece of fufu, dipping the sticky dough into the stew. He inhaled his food, making a loud, wet popping sound after licking his soiled fingers. Tina threw him a dirty stare.

“Must you eat without first thanking God for your meal?” Tina said in Yoruba.

“Oya! Praise Him then!” Sam snapped back in Yoruba. Tina kissed her teeth and forcefully grabbed her husband’s rough hand, closing her eyes. Sola and Chima followed suit as Tina blessed the food.

“Our Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank You for the food You provide for us every day and every night and for allowing us to be fortunate enough to put food on the table. We ask Father that You bless this food we are about to eat and let it nourish us, and that You continue to guide our family towards prosperity and peace. We give You all the praise. In the name of Your Son Jesus Christ we pray, Amen.”

“Amen,” murmured the others, in unison.

Sola dipped the tips of her manicured fingers into her bowl of water, flicking off the excess, and sinking her fingers into the soft pounded yam. She drenched her fufu in the spicy stew and popped it into her mouth. The spices of the stew tickled her throat, causing her to cough.

Everyone ate in silence, as the space filled with the sounds of smacking and swallowing. Sola pulled out her phone with her clean hand, mindlessly scrolling through Instagram as she ate.

Sam peered at Sola from the top of his reading glasses. “Put your phone away at the table. We are eating.”

Sola sighed and shut off her phone, slamming it face down on the table. Sam dropped his ball of fufu on the plate. “What’s wrong with you?”

Sola took several beats before saying in a low voice, “Nothing.”

“It’s something,” Sam pressed on. “You would not be disrespecting me if it weren’t so.”

“I’m not disrespecting you. I’m just tired.”

Tina glared at the side of Sam’s head, willing him to stop. Chima bit into a piece of beef, her eyes trained down at her plate.

“So, it is not disrespectful that you slammed your phone down?” Sam inquired.

Sola was growing tired of her father pushing the matter and wished he would let it go. “It was an accident.”

“An accident, ke?” Sam let out a loud cackle.

“Sam, leave it alone,” Tina hissed at her husband in Yoruba.

“Jo!” Sam exclaimed, his anger bubbling over. “Don’t allow this girl to disrespect me. I am her father.”

Sola knew her father resented her for wasting his hard-earned money on an art degree. These days, she spent her life sitting in a four-by-four cubicle talking to angry customers about overdue balances on their accounts. Working as a customer service representative was the only job she landed after graduating with a useless art degree. Her dad probably hated her even more for not using the degree. Like most Nigerian parents, Sam and Tina wanted their daughters to be doctors, accountants, and lawyers. They didn’t travel all the way to America for their daughters to live the same struggles they did.

Sam and Tina continued arguing in Yoruba – a language Sola and Chima never learned because their mother didn’t feel the need to teach them. As long as their native tongue was English, that’s all that mattered to her.

Sam slammed his meaty hands on the table, shaking everything on the surface, his anger growing stronger. Tina kissed her teeth and returned to the food on her plate, done with the quarrel. Their marriage was full of nonsense arguments, and love was never present in their union.

Sam returned to chomping in silence. Tension filled the space as everyone tried to get through dinner.

Because Sam wasn’t a man who could let things go, he said in a low, calm voice, “If you continue to disrespect me, I will kick you out.”

Growing annoyed with her father, Sola massaged her temple with the pads of her fingers. This was one reason she wanted to live alone. Dinnertime was meant for family to be together at one table and enjoy each other’s company. In the Adebayo’s house, dinnertime was a mere façade to act like they were one big loving family.

Sola was tired of biting her tongue, tired of caring what her father thought of her. Nothing she said or did was good enough for him.

Chima poked at her food silently, a tiny part of her grateful that their father’s wrath wasn’t upon her. Chima had made the mistake once by siding with her sister, and Sam took his anger out on her, claiming that his daughters were against him and needed to read the Bible so they could be reminded to obey their parents.

“I don’t care if you kick me out because I don’t want to be here anymore,” Sola said, the words spilling out of her mouth before she could stop them. Sam looked at her, his stare hard and menacing. Tina looked in disbelief. Chima poked Sola in the thigh, willing her to stop. Sola and Chima had never dared to talk back to Sam in his own home.

Fueled by the burning rage within her, Sola continued. “I know you hate me because I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be. You’re upset because I failed to secure a good career and thrive after graduation. I know that in your head you compare me to your friends, who have children who are successful doctors and engineers, and wonder where I went wrong.  Why can’t you just accept us as we are?”

Silence followed after Sola’s outburst. Finally, Tina cut through the silence and said, “Why we no fe have a good dinner?”

“I agree. Let’s just let it go,” Chima said, uttering her first words that night.

“But Dad started it!” Sola shouted. “I just simply put my phone down, and he thought I was disrespecting him!”

“Do not raise your voice in my house!” Sam exclaimed, slapping his hands down on the table.

“I’m tired of you resenting me! I don’t want to be here anymore!”

“That’s enough!” Tina shouted, silencing everyone with her words. “Stop this nonsense! Just eat and shut up!”

“Tina, you are the reason why these girls talk back to us,” Sam said.

“Me, ke?”

“Yes you.” Sam stabbed his index finger at his daughters. “You don’t know how to set them straight. Because of you, these two don’t know how to respect their elders.”

“What did I do?” Chima asked.

Ignoring Chima’s question, Sam and Tina started back up on their own argument, throwing insults at each other in Yoruba. Chima, used to their loud arguments, continued to eat like nothing was happening. Sola stared at the food on her plate, her appetite gone. All she wanted at this moment was to be as far away from her dysfunctional family as possible.

Once they were done with their screaming match, Sam cleared his plate, licked the leftover stew off his fingers, and stood up.

“Sola, I want you out of this house by the end of the week. I will not take any more disrespect from you,” Sam said.

“Sam—” Tina started.

“Don’t question me,” Sam snapped at Tina. “That is final.” Without another word, he grabbed his newspaper and went upstairs.

Defeated, Tina got up and grabbed her and her husband’s empty plate. Sola and Chima sat alone.

“Did that make you feel better?” Chima asked.

Sola scoffed. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, did it feel good to ruin dinner with your outburst?”

“I didn’t ruin dinner. All I did was stand up for myself. You should try it sometimes.”

Chima shook her head. “You know how Dad is. He’s never going to change.”

“But that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate his disdain for us.”

“I just wouldn’t have gone about it that way.”

“Whatever. You don’t understand,” Sola said. Being around her family depleted her energy. They could never just have a nice, normal family dinner. From this day on, she was done caring about meeting expectations.

“I do understand. I understand that you’re frustrated. I understand that you want Dad to see that you’re trying. I just think there’s a different way to go about it,” Chima said, tearing into a drumstick with her long black nails.

Sola tapped her nails on the edge of her plate, not responding to Chima’s statement. It was useless explaining something to someone who truly didn’t understand.

Once they finished dinner, they helped their mother with the dishes. They wiped the table free of stew drippings and vacated into their rooms. Sam — who had changed into his plaid pajama pants and ratty white t-shirt — lay in bed, reading the rest of his newspaper. Tina lay on the other side of him, nightgown and bonnet on, watching the 10 o’clock news on TV, its sound lowered to not disturb Sam.

 Chimah sat on the fuzzy beanbag in the corner of her room, listening to a guided meditation practice to cleanse her mind of the night’s debacle.

Sola, hoping to drown out thoughts of a dinner destroyed, popped her earbuds back in and listened to soft R&B music in her dark room. She wondered what it would be like if everyone in her family actually loved each other and worried if her father’s feelings would be the same tomorrow morning.


Rita Balogun is a Nigerian American writer who studied creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdoches, Texas. She currently freelances as a ghostwriter.

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tamara j. madison poetry march 2025

after “Born Again and Again” by DaMaris B. Hill, Breath Better Spent

“Your woman tongue can hoist bodies into heaven.”


That’s why I keep my

lips lightly rouged,

pressed, rarely wet.

My mouth opens

only upon conviction.

Heaven got no rooms for irreverent

‘hoes, liars, cheats, beasts.

Meanwhile, hell writing another bill of sale,

buying territory for expansion,

gentrifying dreams, redlining

degrees of treachery.

In a world of flames,

rent ain’t affordable.


My mouth opens

only upon conviction

in case heaven runs short-

free rooms Gabriel

prematurely assigned.


Tamara J. Madison, poet, writer, and editor, is the author of Threed, This Road Not Damascus (Trio House Press – print and EAT Poems – audio). Her writing is inspired by her ancestry and relations. Her work has been reviewed and published in various journals and literary magazines including The Amistad, Appalachian Review, Poetry International, Cider Press Review, and World Literature Today.  Tamara has also shared her poetry on the TEDx platform. She is a MFA graduate of New England College and an Anaphora Arts and Ucross fellow. She currently teaches English and Creative Writing and is completing a new full-length mixed-genre collection. Find her @tamarajmadison on Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter.