LEAVING NEPTUNE
Same Faces Collective
Issue XVI
19 November 2024
Nonfiction
I named the playlist la playa. I don’t know why exactly. We were
three miles from the beach, and you were the one who’d learned Spanish. Perhaps I was invoking
Javelin and the spirit of the third date. Perhaps it was the circlet of loamy sand, all the moves we made
etched in our wake. Perhaps it was my heels calling home to the island and the waters that will always
be warm. I play Neptune from Planetarium, and as the first chords ring through the redwoods you say I love this song.
PIGMENTUM
The Ekphrastic Review
20 September 2024
Poetry
it was the year of riotous blossoming; hydrangeas spilled in clouds and waves across the arboretum and along the stone lanes in shades of weld and smalt and madder lake, the palette my mother wanted for your bouquet – wanted in vain, because we married in April and spring arrived too late.
MOUTHFULS
Club Plum Literary Journal
Volume 5 Issue 3
12 July 2024
Poetry
as if we never have before. as if we’ve forgotten how it reverberates in the split-second after letting go. in the salt grass after sunset, on the red line train two stations from the end, one thousand feet above sea level looking west from the top of the world.
EXOGENESIS
Sky Island Journal
Issue 26
21 October 2023
Poetry
You never dream of leaving in the night. I don’t know where you hide
your passport and when the fire alarm goes off, you leave the building empty handed. Some summers I don’t cross
the threshold until the milk is sour;
on this continent that’s a long time.
ON THE PLANTATION
OF DAUGHTERS
Uncanny Magazine
6 September 2022
Speculative Poetry
komarika (that you may find solace when spurned, your fingers searing supernova around the perimeter of diyas; that even when clay ceases to calm you will be caressed; that when you ride
to battle there will be balm
keeping vigil in the tent;
that your hair will grow back
as often as you blade it stark
to your skull in mourning,
in mutiny, in signaling beacons and transports of joy—
TRICONA
Strange Horizons
14 March 2022
Speculative Poetry
now that the last unstaked earth
we can claim is the triangle wedged beneath fore and hind wheels
I burn with hunger for cremation knowing
you will feed my embers to the chassis
at night and gather me close
in the oil-choked morning
and not be imprisoned for littering
and I will do the same for you.
​
EUCALYPTUS
3Elements Review
Issue 44
1 November 2024
Poetry
you didn’t tell her | when she spoke that fast | you could only catch one word in four | some day she will scatter those cards among the other cities she loves | summer fire escape in New Orleans | midday commute through the heart of Bangkok | trying to stop the cards from flying out the sides of the tuk | slender hands lively with mirth
CARMELITE
Ekstasis Magazine
23 August 2024
Poetry
I stole a calla lily today. I was late for the Gloria and callas grow on every continent save Antarctica but they were newly planted and you wouldn’t have missed your chance. I sat on the verandah still wearing my shoes. Mary and I didn’t need to talk.
TUSKER BLUE
Strange Horizons
15 August 2022
Speculative Fiction
“Please,” the voice begged again, and this time there was something terribly familiar about how it wisped at the edges. You turned and Hailé was hunched by the counter, holding the Rift in his bare stomach together with his hands. Blue memory fluid, almost but not quite the shade of an April sky over the paddy fields, flowed through his fingers and down his sarong before coiling away through the ankle-deep water.
​
SKIN DEEP
Cartridge Lit
26 May 2022
Poetry
Rampart is everyone
I’m scared you imagine after I leave
so stereotypically brash, so phenotypically neat, the East India Company vowels
so freshly unboxed, so unlike my IRL tongue that can’t untangle w and v
because my language will soon be too extinct to earn subtitles.
​
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
Uncanny Magazine
1 March 2022
Speculative Poetry
Every day you leave
I think about leaving you
and Chaya from Marketing says
Marie why don’t you bring your man
to the borrels anymore
and Chaya’s sisters are shifters
and I could tear the plowed fields apart with them for miles after work and dark
and you’d never notice.
​
YENE ZEMA, FIKIR
Transition
Issue 131, November 2021
Nonfiction
Their names surround me now, both the ones they have given me and the ones I have given them as protection, each one a cup infused with so many strains of tea: emotions, adjectives, the whole of the Holy Bible. Their names mean leader, shield, blessed, and pure; their names mean beautiful, Sheba, queen, and joy. They have names that sing of silk, of fabric rustling over red terracotta floors, of ancestors commanding endure; they have names passed down from Noah, over eons and oceans, through infinite worlds.
KATTAKUMANJAL
Lammergeier,
Issue 10, Autumn 2021
Flash Nonfiction
Our next-door neighbor wields incense to ward off mosquitoes. Every evening she circles her yard carrying a copper saucer of benzoin, boiled down to the consistency of treacle. The smell stays with us forever after the first inhalation; it clings to clothes, hair, sinuses.
NOTES FROM A CROSS-CULTURAL SUMMER
SAGA Vol. 83, May 2020
1st Place, SAGA Prose Award
Nonfiction
I’m in a landlocked naval base two hundred miles from my hometown and all the people who know my signals are oceans away, scattered across four continents. I eat and say thank you and keep my food down and I know there are unknown men in the corner of every room, but they’re soldiers, so I can’t even track their footsteps.
I HOLD THE DOOR
SAGA Vol. 82, May 2019
2nd Place, SAGA Poetry Award
The world unfolds
in a Rock Island coffee shop.
Maroc, France, Deutschland, Italia.
You make December pilgrimages
to your mother’s country.
I eye your charcoal curls
and the length of your lashes
as you talk of Rajasthan
and traversing the Ganges.
​
IES ABROAD BLOG
AMSTERDAM
Fall 2019
Butterflies, Crossroads, The Universe: Answers I've Found In Amsterdam
​
When the boat docks in the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, it’s begun to rain. The captain hands passengers up out of the canal, bidding each one a merry Goedenacht! I pull up my hood and wend my way through De Wallen, towards the bright lights of Prins Hendrikkade. My Dutch friends avoid this part of Amsterdam, but it's one of my favourite neighbourhoods to spend a last evening; slipping through narrow alley-streets, boots ringing on rain-slick cobblestones, watching for new wonders around every corner.
​
THE INVESTIGATION IS STILL ONGOING
Entropy,
1 September 2021
Nonfiction
I have been justifying, as so many of us do, my actions and my life after the fact. When in fact none of it is relevant, because I wasn’t the one who put all this in motion. But that’s how we’re trained, isn’t it? That’s how we’re raised. I’ve provided the background, Your Honour. Now let me present the facts of the case.
FLAYED
ANGLES,
Issue 9, Summer 2021
Poetry
I am cracked leaf skin the wrong shade of brown decaying under thermals and socks and camisoles and sweaters and tights and jeans and lingerie and leather and hats and scarves and gloves and if you wanted to peel me into pieces it would take you longer than it would to build an igloo outside the dormitory ice piled on ice piled on ice fingers losing all feeling and so disappearing –
JEWEL PATIENCE
Sky Island Journal,
Issue 16, April 2021
Flash Fiction
No one told me that the spirit against whom I would have to guard would be a woman with skin as smooth as a ripe brinjal, that her hair would be braided tighter than the ropes of my fishing nets, that she would speak a language older than Sinhala and I would understand her anyway.
SCHMETTERLINGSKÜSSE
SAGA Vol. 83, May 2020
Nonfiction
Look into them and everything disappears except the sky, bleu de triomphe, the spirits of souls. Raise your head; the benedictions fall into you. Schmetterlingsküse. You haven’t seen butterflies in aeons but here they are now in their jeweled millions, Jezebel and the Leopard and the Ceylon Tiger, parantica taprobana, not to be confused with the Tamil Tiger, winging across the island to Samanalakanda, where the Buddha's footprint appears at sunrise.
ATHTHI
SAGA Vol. 82, May 2019
Barbara Anderson Miller Award 2019
3rd Place, SAGA Prose Award
Nonfiction
I am standing in a Hobby Lobby parking lot, thinking of Aththi. The sky is an enormous blue, cross-stitched with jet trails from planes so high that I have no chance of hearing them. The light, though, is the same gold that gilds Aththi when he walks down the drive to close the gate for the evening. Time zone math insists that this event has already happened eleven hours ago, eighteen thousand kilometers away, but let me now imagine him, standing at the gate.