The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 6 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Relief

'Baffle': Sehri Tales selections, Day 6

The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 5 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Deny

The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 4 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Promise

Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength

Umar stood in line with all the patience in the world. He could smell the anxiety and fear in the air. The room was filled with people once glorifying death and taking pride in solitude, now filled with panic in the face of reality.

The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 3 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Watermelon.

The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 2 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Rescue

The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 1 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Ignite.

The voices–the wails that had called me here–were emanating from these very graves. 

Although there is much merit to the representation of women’s pain, the evolution of the heavily aestheticised “sad girl” trope in popular culture has started to make a mawkish caricature of real women’s suffering

How do I tell her, that things often don't work out the way you expect them to, / And that you are, in fact, alone in this

When Gayatri Spivak ends her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) with a definitive statement “the subaltern cannot speak”, a section of literary criticism took that dictum literally—accepting the “cannot” to represent mutism or an inability to speak.

How do you think I feel every time I find you hovering over the door to my classroom? Like when you’re the only passenger riding up a lift, and then it suddenly stops.

The only way they chose to do this was probably written or imprinted in our genes–a wild frenzy of carnal expressions filled their faces.

Years later, when I would no longer live in my parents' room and grow to have my own,/ I would disregard all the hours I had spent by the window staring at beetles hiding.

You muttered, “Full Stop,”  I echoed, “Rest in Peace,” 

Let me tell you about Qahr.  A word not in my mother tongue, 

I took a lonely stroll  on the hollows of your cheeks

TRIGGER WARNING: animal brutality