Aashna Sahni

Aashna Sahni

Here, histories mingle
like fingers meet at a palm.

Early mornings in the city, waking –
I run along that wrinkle between thumb and wrist,
cobblestone walkways
laying ground
to highrise McDonald’s signs
and German tour guides,
foreign sneakers pounce
to capture the city as it wakes –
with flash.

The valley between fingers
crinkle with littered paper –
sidewalks lined with the Irish Times
read,
yesterday’s stories crunch under
rushing business feet,
ink blotched from last night’s beer –
mâché carpets of crosswords
and local marriage announcements.

And Joyce orders a pint
at the base of my palm –
Wilde writes
on a stool beside my forefinger –
and Mr Kavanagh reminds
to inquire about him
in a hundred years’ time.

I keep them
cupped in my hand
for the drive back to my Galway.

Talia Green

Children stun me with their
relentless energy
to run
jump and yell.
I am still so young
but I feel so crisply burnt out,
caught on the
ragged jagged
teeth of life.
I am in its great
maw, struggling
fiercely, exhausting and bleeding
myself out.
I am on its floor,
pinned against the resisting current.
Will it only get worse?
as years are eroding me and I
will never be what I was
as the sands of time reshape
me and
maybe that’s a good thing—
to be remade anew,
but I would latch
myself to the great tit
of the earth and suckle deep to
take vitality from Gaia
herself and
be human again.

Olivia McKnight

Aashna Sahni

Isabella Neblett

“Do you want me to read you some poetry?” He asked.

Lidia shifted in her chair and faced the window. “Then I won’t be able to hear the
bird.”

She had placed the cage on a stand in the space between their two chairs. The bird
chirped and she hummed along.

He held his book of poetry heavily in his hands. It mostly consisted of Frost, the
wintry poems that reminded him of their New Hampshire visits in the years before their
daughter, Alexa, was born. In the years when they were deeply and softly in love. In the
years when they were best friends.

He sat down. Shortly after hearing the news of her deteriorating vision, Lidia
asked him to read her Frost. They would sit for hours in their chairs, until his voice was
hoarse and her glassy eyes closed, her lips in a smile. They were falling in love again.

They did this every afternoon, until one day Alexa swept in on the morning
breeze, as she always did, with a songbird in a cage dangling from her arm, and Lidia
dropped everything, as she always did. His wife lapped up Alexa’s attention like a stray
over a puddle. Only after Alexa moved on, leaving as quickly as she had come, would
Lidia then remember to pick up all the things she so promptly discarded, one of them
being her husband.

His hand fanned through the book, the pages like velvet under his
thumb.
“Do you want me to open a window?”

They left the door to the cage open so that the bird could “feel free,” as his wife
always said. Now, it was summer and, as the windows were all closed in the apartment, the two of them had to move through the thick, stuffy air, dripping in the heat. Mostly, he
was doing the moving—making their meals, cleaning the apartment, getting groceries,
feeding the bird, making sure everything was in order for his blind wife.

The bird danced on the wooden beam inside the cage, cocking its head from left
to right, watching him.

“Shh.” She waved him off, her eyes closed. “The bird.”

“It never flies out, though,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think it would ever leave.” She drew her arms close to herself,
grinning and swaying slightly in the chair. He knew she meant to say it would never
leave her. Abandon her, fly off on the wind. He nodded, though he knew she couldn’t
see.
“I just don’t want something flying in and hurting it,” she finished.

As if, God forbid, they couldn’t find another songbird exactly like this one.

She was humming “La Vie en Rose”, a song that they discovered together after he
bought her an Edith Piaf record for their first apartment. She was the only one who could get him to sing, loosen up his tone-deaf vocal cords and belt out verses that were either too flat or too sharp. Only around her, with her swinging hips and her snapping fingers, did he not worry about the way his sound polluted hers.

“What a great song.” He said.

She nodded. “It’s Alexa’s and my favorite.”

He took off his reading glasses and rubbed his forehead. That’s right. Their
daughter could sing before she could talk. By the time Alexa was up on her feet, she was
sticking her hips out and clapping her hands in the shadow of her mother’s silhouette. He used to watch them, pleased that his Lidia now had a partner to match her ability. His
forehead just crinkled at the thought that it was never him. He placed his gold-rimmed glasses back on.

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

One time he joined in on their duet, the sound so beautiful, it was too hard to
resist. Alexa was a teenager then, her hips swaying smoother than her mother’s, her
fingers snapping quicker, her voice ringing prettier. Envy clouded Lidia’s eye, but she
didn’t dare take it out on their daughter. When his voice burped out into the air, flattening theirs, both stopped and stared at him. Then Alexa began to laugh, high and clear like her song. The look of envy melted from Lidia’s gaze as she joined her daughter’s giggling melody. His face burned and tingled, and felt as though their snickering was peeling off his skin.

“Dad,” Alexa said, her voice weak with laughter. “You tried.”

He then joined in, chuckling loudly and flatly so as to not be excluded from
everything, even his own mockery. He strained so hard, the force pulled a muscle in his
side.

His face burned and tingled now, even remembering it. He rubbed his arm, the
metal of his wedding ring leaving red lines on his skin. At least it had survived the
flaying.

“It was my favorite song, too.”

Lidia hummed the chorus and did not respond.
He tipped his head back against the chair and let the book slip through his sweaty
hands and drop to the floor. The bird chirped. She harmonized. He sat still. After awhile, her low murmuring stopped. Then, the bird ceased. He opened his eyes to his wife, asleep in her chair, a smile on her face. The bird was perched on its wooden bar.
He stared at the way it stayed in the cage, even though it was free to fly around in
the apartment. Lidia insisted they never clip its wings.

He stood and approached the window. He pulled the wooden frame upwards and let in a flood of cool air. He gestured towards the opening as if to say “there you go.”

The bird’s small black eyes watched him. Normal birds would leave her. Normal birds would leave him. His hand reached inside the cage, grabbing the bird in his fist and pulled it out. Its feathers were silky, like the velvet pages of his poetry book. It chirped and squirmed but when he opened his palm, it rested in his hand. He offered it out to the open air.

“You’re free, now.”

It tilted its head to one side, then the other. It did not flap its wings. It did not float
away on the morning breeze. It would not leave them alone.
With his other hand, he gripped its head, the beak cold and sharp under his thumb,
and snapped its neck.

Now, it was him who was free.

“Did you just say something?”

He froze, his wife stirring in her chair. He still made eye contact with her, a 50-
year-old habit that was too hard to break. He hid the bird behind his back. He knew she couldn’t see but the way her cloudy eyes seemed to fixate on him sometimes made him think otherwise.

“What?” He asked. He couldn’t tell her.

“I thought I heard you say something.” She said.

He needed to tell her. “No, I didn’t.”

“I’m blind, not deaf.”

He should tell her. “The bird. It—”

“The bird, what?” She bolted upright. Her papery fingers dug into the arms of the
chair.

He stopped. There was a concern in her face that he hadn’t seen since Alexa still
lived with them. He always thought the way a mother dotes on her daughter, in spite of
her simmering jealousy, was unparalleled. He had accepted long ago that he was
replaced. Part of him knew it the day they brought their baby home, when he was looking at his best friend, while she was looking at Alexa. Yet, now a songbird held the same amount of her attention, of her concern.

He should tell her—his hand tossed the bird’s body out the window—but he won’t.

“I opened the window to get some air in here and it flew out,” he said.

“What?”

He sat down in his chair. “It left.”

She blinked rapidly, tears brimming on her bottom lids. She slumped back in her
chair. “Oh.”

“Do you want me to read you some poetry?”

For a while, she didn’t move. Then, eventually, she nodded and turned her face
slightly away. She wiped at her cheeks but he just opened the book. He knew that now
they could fall deeply and softly in love again. They sat for hours until his voice grew
hoarse and her glassy eyes closed, her lips in a frown.

Isabelle Mongeau

Aashna Sahni

I remember trailing along behind my mom in the grocery store. We were walking through the refrigerated section, past the milk and cheese and yogurt. “Honey, are you coming?” she called, pushing the cart further ahead.

“Yes, ” I said, but I let the distance between us grow, pulling off my mittens with my
teeth, stuffing them in my pockets, and eyeing her back. Once her attention was directed
elsewhere, I moved toward the refrigerator and slid open a cardboard carton of eggs. I grasped one egg between my fingers and deftly lifted it from its compartment and examined it for cracks. After deciding that it was intact, I slid it underneath my shirt and closed the carton again.

My mom turned around a moment later and held out a hand for mine. I quickened my
pace and took it, all the while cradling the egg against the warm skin of my stomach. It was cold, but as we walked, my body heat moved through its shell to the thing inside, and it was warmed. I was careful. This egg wasn’t going to be scrambled or fried. This egg was going to hatch.

I would keep it warm underneath my pillow until one day a crack would spread like a
ripple across its creamy surface. A tiny yellow beak would emerge, soft but pointed at the tip. It would break free of its confines and sit in the palm of my hand, looking up at me with round, infant eyes. I imagined how it would chirp as I dropped seeds into its open mouth. It would grow big and round, and then it would lay more eggs and I would fill a whole carton and leave it on the counter for my mom. She would ask, “Where did these come from?” I would remain silent because stealing is wrong. She would be happier not knowing where they came from, knowing only that there was something to cook for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and she wouldn’t need to worry.

I stood by the checkout counter, listening to the beeps that separated my mom’s words.
“Just the cereal,” she said. “Just the cereal. We don’t need that. And you can pull out the
pretzels as well. I’m sorry. I thought I added it up properly, but you know how it goes…” I cupped my hand around the egg and relished the thought that she wouldn’t have to do this again. I was the youngest of five children. I was the smallest, the quietest, the one who knew the least, but I had a plan.

Once she was finished, we walked through the sliding automatic doors and into the cold.
I carried one bag and my mother carried the rest, the receipt, which was clutched between her fingers, trembling in the wind. We made our way across the blacktop and the air burned my ears and cheeks until they were red. I hugged the egg closer.

When we got to the car, I pulled on the handle to open the back door. It was stuck, so I jerked harder and, as I did, in a moment of carelessness, the egg tumbled from beneath my shirt and cracked against the frozen ground, the white shell jagged against black. I fell to my knees, scooping the running yolk back into the broken shards with my hands.

My mother pulled me to my feet, goo streaming from between my fingers. “That’s
strange,” she said. “I didn’t buy any eggs. Let’s go.” I blinked away tears and climbed into the car, leaving fragments of egg and shell to freeze against the pavement.

Kelly Doyle

My mother cuts hydrangeas. She bundles them
in a glass vase, sets them on an inside table
and they are beautiful, half budded and clean.
She cut them because they were too heavy on the stalk.
Their heads bowed down. Reaching
toward the house was not easy.
They seemed to know if they stretched far enough
my mother would walk down with shears and bring them closer to her.

Nora Sullivan