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You will not find us on the six o'clock news,
two kohl-stained lines artfully staining our cheeks.
We do not stare doe-eyed from behind curtains
of silken maize hair. No one makes movies of us.
They call us Medusa's daughters but she
is merely the first and oldest of our hideous sorority,
bastard children of our virgin mother. We who dared to say
"My life is my own."

There is nothing more monstrous in our gaze than
a mirror. Look into these eyes and be paralyzed
not by our curse but your selfsame necrotizing corruption,
knowledge of your complicity feeding us to
the monsters at the gate, throwing us under the bus,
then nailing our scarred visages to the lintel,
a cautionary tale for the girls who got to be good.




Saira Ali grew up in the deep south of the US and has still not acclimated to New England winters. She is both an engineer and a poet, and rejects false dichotomies in all forms. She has published poetry in Mythic Delirium and Stone Telling.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
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