by Sowmya Swaminathan

If you eat lady’s fingers, you will be incredible at solving math problems. There’s obviously no scientific research to prove this because this is a juicy myth that originated in India, specifically in our southern communities that have historically valued logic and rational thought, and have fervently passed on this tasty myth across generations.

I wonder what mythical qualities our other foods have. What is a vegetable that I need to hunt down to be good at say, arts or humanities? Is it perhaps coconut, which is not even a vegetable in the first place? Wikipedia calls it a fruit but it feels wrong to box up a superfood inside a restrictive label.

Every afternoon this year, my mother has woken up to grate and grind up a coconut to extract its milk. She then adds cardamom and jaggery to it and allows the mixture to be its glorious self for a few hours. The coconut milk dissolves the hard as nails jaggery till it gives up and floats around without a fight.
I drink this liquid every evening, hoping against hope that it will be a balm for my shriveled insides. I pray that it rights whatever went abysmally wrong with my wounded gut. I pray that this white substance brings emotional moisture to my hardened spirit. I pray that it brings back my fight. I pray that it makes me hard as nails again.

It is nuts that it took a pandemic for me to put my faith back into this magical object when it has humbly and mutely been a part of my life for so long.

My mother has added grated coconut to nearly every meal she has made in my living memory. Every guest who crossed our homely threshold on a festive occasion has never gone home empty handed. We made sure it was filled to the brim with coconuts. I have smashed coconuts into the skull of a man-child who mercilessly ghosted me in my 20s. Oh, wait — that one must have happened in a dream. My father broke a coconut shell open outside a Ganesha temple on the day I became a topper in my grade 12 math exam.

It’s now time to rewrite our juicy myths.

by Victoria Ruiz

Tennessee, 1918
two trains collide head-on
in The Great Trainwreck.

How to account for the hurry,
visibility- fathers boarding for work
metal  clam-latched lunch boxes just filled-
mothers at home, making chamomile tea as the kettle blows.

Goodbyes last as long as they are remembered.

Wreck into me like that-
hungry and packed.
Miss the warnings tracked
in protocol.

Take me off radar with the thrust
only an engine could give.

We are either moving toward or away
from our next destination in fury or
reticent sorrow.

Be the fever that splurges nearly too late.
Be the platform runner catching the express-
in opposite direction.

Somewhere, a conductor pulls the horn
in kettle steam promise that we will
arrive just in time.

Suburban Aisles

This is suburbia.
White and divided
aggregate salt brined winter
roads bowed in neighborhood
plots engineered
to spill rain into gutter.

The place window boxes adorn closed
homes and driveways tilt
and hedges grow
and lawns are mowed
and we seed the grass
and we water
the grass
and the mail comes predictable

by noon.

It is Saturday, we are searching
for screws through bins and boxes
of interior and exterior
screws.

I break to where the flowers live in recycled
trays- olfactory paths swept
in scent and growth.
We pay dearly to be reminded
of love in this way.

We make due with longevity
and promise in separate aisles
as we search and we screw
in a garden made from the love
that we’ve found along the salted
and divided highways home.

Takotsubo Heart

There are so many drab houses on my block-
tentacle vines and road cracks.
I am out of love poems. Today,

the sky is purging its line first with rain secondly,
snow. Spring is 118 days away. I am

remembering the time you held my hand, traced my thumb.
First date- blindness is a skill tracing damp in the bones.

How to let the sun blind you opposable and fertile.

I am octopus and takotsubo heart-
inkblot gone mad.

by Vanessa-Renee Mical

The number thirteen is supposed to be unlucky. Maybe it is. In our apartment, 13M, when I learned that “M” was the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, it seemed accurate to me, growing up constantly reminded that we were twice as unlucky. But maybe there is just as much magic in a curse as in a wish upon a star. Maybe they are the same, depending on how much time you allow yourself to look at them. And maybe, if you have already been spinning out of control, when the world turns upside down, it lands you safely back upon your feet.

By the time I got home on election night, I was inconsolable, and you were the last person I wanted to see. At that point, we weren’t speaking, tired of using each other as props to claw our way out of our own mental illnesses. I was sure that I never wanted to speak to you again. It had been so many years since 13M. But there you were, watching the election returns on my couch with Chris, my brother and roommate, and there wasn’t time to say much before Donald Trump took the stage to declare victory. We couldn’t have known at the time that although this moment would be a ripple that would tear through other families, it would be the thing that would bring us back together. And by the time the morning light hit my face, after fitful hours of crying because my country had betrayed me, you held me again, just like the first time after I exited your womb.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. Before I came home on election night, I was with two of my best friends from childhood. We were filled with champagne and confidence, ready to celebrate the first woman elected president together. As sure as I was then that I was never going to speak to you again, I would have sworn that these women, my chosen family, would be in my life forever. I called them my soulmates. Their kids called me auntie. So much can change in four years.

The cracks were small at first, after all they both voted for Hillary. Both claimed to be feminists. But they are white and privileged, and soon to expose a couple of things to me, about how someone like Trump doesn’t win an election without a million tiny excuses that lead the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The truth is, they probably revealed themselves sooner, but I just wasn’t paying attention. Before long, it would be crystal clear that they either didn’t really believe Black lives mattered, at least not to the extent that would require any real sacrifice on their part, or would be perfectly fine letting their husband’s argue that All Lives Mattered for contrarian’s sake. They were just “asking questions”, after all. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t handle a little healthy debate? It shouldn’t have surprised me, as it did, that they would also excuse violence at the hands of these men. That they would stop calling me, texting me, until it felt like we never knew each other at all. That I would quickly come to believe it is better this way, for how long can you surround yourself with toxicity before it starts to penetrate and metastasize your last healthy cells.

Friendship lost is a grief that I am still struggling to understand. It hurts worse than any heartbreak from an old lover. But the further I get from them, the closer I get to you. The time that I spent texting them is time I now get to text you. I thought I would be marching in the streets with them, but instead, the marches helped me find my way back to you. You have been right about so much. You saw all of the things I didn’t see coming. You tried to warn me. I am sorry that it took so long for me to listen. As the world falls apart around us, we forged a path for ourselves out of the ashes. I am no longer ashamed to be just like you, Mom. I see now that it is what has helped me survive. And now, together, we begin to march on.

by Vanessa DeWolf

We meet in our dimly lit bathroom
two full bladders, two empty glasses
orange bathroom not primed—-> 6 layers of orange latex over that green-gray —-> brushes rinsed 2am, year 2000
the moon hovers over our quiet pale __________________________ I could be waiting
nudity, shoulders point-touch, naked, the sound ________ for the day, on my back
of running water & spiraling bar-soap in hands. _______ heat off you & your rumble
Clean towels from laundry
IF I BAKE AN APPLE TART TOMORROW ______ ▷ the bedroom more on my mind than yours
To eat an apple tart with you _____________________ when you cross your hands on my crown
look over forks/mouth the ________________________ and mine softly rest on the sheet↩︎
tart apples/space between us ____________________ then on side of your chest-rhythm __________ I could get lost
maple leaf/mountain now snow-peaked ______________________________________________________ in dreaming [sigh]
and piles of soft fallen yellow———underfoot __________________________________________in bed/sinking in & down
You swallow your last bite long after my devouring
Then the television-lights-screens all dark _______________________________ >TO HAVE ANOTHER NIGHT WITH YOU <
In bed a fleeting of my orphan state and your fatherless one /bittersweet mixture of once-were-children/two bodies
here next to you like a fading bedsheet-stain——————————————> SALTY, PERMANENT, SPILLING, HISTORICAL
& non-alkaline/// I close my eyes/// WHOLE ROMANESCO———————> Fractal green cauliflower! I’m roasting
vegetable dinner ___________________________________________________________ > MY LEFT HAND RESTS ON YOUR RIGHT HIP
________________________________________________________________________________ ANOTHER NIGHT WITH YOU <

VERISIMILITUDE IS NOT A PLACE TO HIDE

We are taking photographs on a trip. It’s okay we think, we’ve done this before.  We’ll use our phones, keep that kind of distance, be tourists. We are anonymous and the place is famous, so every inch is both in our imagination and out there. /// She’s been in and out of here all her life.  A feather or a shell she carries.  The kind of carapace that prevents it from being a symbol, it’s a storage unit or some unavoidable bitter smell, the sweetness all evaporated. And how far away is it for her? /// Impressive cupolas and gingerbread details in a blue, so blue sky. Shutterless. Sprocketless. Not a single –click-advances our film.  We are the smartphone duet of poses and posing distracted by the task of framing. /// She is in unfortunate clothing, a size too small, too tight, digging in.  Her mascara is precise, eyeliner hides her wings. The bite.  She is unphotogenic because she does not want to be accidental background.  /// You can’t tell on this kind of day where danger might be. Danger doesn’t even know it’s dangerous. /// She’s holding in her flab with the strength of her jaw.  She is trying to breathe. /// We are lost. She is lost. /// We drop one phone, shatter screen.  We drop the phone as we escape, as we notice basements & attics, as the rise of secrets—————-actual living that causes us to run. We’ve been recognized. We, fugitives, are most afraid of recognition. /// Not guns, but phone pings + GPS identifications and this. .  . this pale blue sky in victorian town, demolishes from its symbol & our imagination. /// We were named too truly.