Scorching in a way the April sun never was. / Scorching in a way a fever never feels. / It wasn't just grief

Then you will vanish—becoming Amma, Chachi, Mami. No one will remember your name.

I am not a single name. Not a single wound.

I made my first kite out of white paper scraps; on my 16th birthday, it came to me that they needed a pop of color.

Grey chips of rough cement  Rust rubble all around,

This was the way it ended: not with fire, But carried quietly under sleep-beds,

The moon is a cheeseball,  Cratered, yellow, and huge like your eyeballs 

I rush to the mirror. My gums are pristine, no wound, no sin. But when I look back at the fruit, the truth reveals itself: the flesh is blackened, writhing with tiny, hungry mouths. The rot has teeth

Moving mindlessly and / Etching every alley along the way / With verses devoted to you

Who do I tell, sir? The walls do not listen, The roads do not answer back

In Gaza, the names of the martyrs slip through silence, lost to a world too distracted to listen

We'll put up feigned politicians / And their fake promises instead

Tell me I am not a house without exits. Leave

The rain began at dusk, its cold fingers tracing the cracked panes of the house like an unwelcome visitor. By midnight, the storm had grown wild, wind howling through the trees, rattling the fragile bones of the dwelling. I stood before the door, my hand trembling on the tarnished brass handle.

The cream colored bowl held the steaming, almost translucent yellow broth with traces of white, garnished by an array of green onions slashed in an angle.

It’s been so long since we last spoke that I don’t think I can talk to you without confessing something. There you were, standing before me

I see her now, but not in the way I have always seen her—through the lens of service, of duty, of roles—but as a woman whose edges were softened long before I learned her name

He had consistently disregarded the villagers' accounts of bhoot-prets as local folklore. To him, they were just stories to scare the gullible

I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth

Raise no alarm, if on a night dimly lit,