FABLE WITH FROGS

On February 10, 2024, Myanmar’s military junta announced it would mandate conscription for the first time since the People’s Military Service Law was passed in 2010. Under the law, all men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 are eligible to serve in the armed forces for at least two years.

—The Diplomat Begin: a family of frogs, sitting nervously

together. Once, the pond was a puddle,

but the gravel gave way beneath plodding

wheels, and the rains that came did not know

how to cease. Enter: snakes with rifles,

green as jackfruit skin. Saying, Give us

your son. Hunger grips us like water.

Mother Frog weeping, clutching her son’s

webbed feet, her tongue like bamboo shoots

in her mouth. He’s too young, she begs.

Please. He’s my only son. Who will rub balm

on my joints on rainy days? Who will sit with me

when the thunder clamours so loud it shakes

the ground? Who will protect me when

the burglars clamber over our netted wall to steal

the last of my mother’s jewels? But the snakes

unhinge their jaws. They swallow him whole.

THIRD SPRING

in response to Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War”

I sit                  in summer,
stalled, statuesque.

In a poem        I summon
a pile of bodies

touched with blood,
clumped                      and wet–

tall enough      to climb over.

In Bagan,        the pagodas
drown. Each golden temple

an upturned cup
suspended in spillage.

In her apartment my mother
moves              the tables

away from the windows.
A lifetime ago             there were

mangoes          knocking with the rain.
But the cyclone comes,

spins gunfire               streaking
from the sky. Every day

an airstrike—on hands
that might have wrung

poems,             feet that might
have waded                 through lake water,

eyes that could have read Kaminsky

and cried, We lived.

I WAS ALWAYS A POET WITH A DEAD FATHER

My first love poem was a poem for my father.

He was young like me.

He was young until me.

When he died, he stammered ash.

The kind we begged to keep. 

The kind we couldn’t.

What use have I for a living father?

Present like the sun, beloved,

watching sparrows bend the grass.

Some other life he sees where I am now.

He’s proud. My epigraphs are lines

he approves of. My poet daughter, he says. 

Just like her father. I break my father’s

memory on frozen lakes. Cast it over

the cattails. How thin his hair.

How soft his flesh. In lieu of an epitaph

I want to know what happened to his glasses. 

Whether his last words were a poem. 

And if I say they were? Across the sea

his ghost waits in a yellow-walled house.

A man, still lonely. Old as a country.

Young as a nation. He takes a breath

I am still holding.

*

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar, and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), Unsprung (Newfound, 2023), and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Composition & Rhetoric at UW-Madison.

Introduction by Tiffany Troy

Samia Mimo writes: “My body is a fable my mind refuses to read.” Like the room that the poem’s speaker dwells lives in, it bears witness for her other unbroken half, of possibilities that do not seek to be erased by soap. I loved the grace in the “silly continuity” in the face of the immensity of “I am born with a cracked hymen too”, and “peace in the form of a rollerblading Barbie and not depravity in the form of touches in a cage.” There is a solemnity in Mimo’s diction that complements the sexual trauma of her female speaker.

I. the room

There’s nothing special about the room: I live in it still, the walls still stare down at me and the queen-size bed still cradles me like my mother. Something in it lingers and rots from 2021, maybe it’s fear or humiliation or reality. Reality is something that has never lied to me, a silent god in my mouth and the only god that has never needed me to be on my knees.

The humiliation is something else, something that I still cannot name even though it’s on the tip of my tongue and behind my eyelids when I close my eyes. I cannot name the feeling of his hands nor the way his voice echoed in my ears nor the way I froze. The fear is nothing anymore. Or maybe it is something. There is always that small doubt that creeps in because I don’t remember anything but humiliation and fear. When did it happen? How old was I? The room remembers and the memory festers—ugly, alive.

2. the cleansing

Soap tastes funny. I’ve always liked soap, all the different colors and scents and the solid feel of them in my hand. It was always meant to clean off dirt and make me smell like I belong to this world. Now I wash with a fervor until my body aches and prunes up. Maybe it’s an odd routine, maybe it’s that I like the water hot, maybe I’m not trying to erase anything. It foams up and washes away a little too fast.

3. the robbery

Mythology says that original humans were born with two heads, four arms and legs, with immense power that even Zeus feared. It is said he cut them into two and we’ve been searching for our other half since.

4. the longing

Who is it—what is it? What is it that I’ve been searching for? Sometimes I think I wasn’t cut into two. I think I was carved out harshly. Something essential was taken from me. I feel like I’ve been robbed when I’m overcome with grief like never before. Who could I have been, unbroken?

5. the body & mind

My body is a fable my mind refuses to read. It holds every ache, every touch that has long faded. My mind builds walls around it, calls it healing, but my body hums in this constant static. It must argue sometimes: my mind declares it’s over and my body whispers it never was.

6. the good ending

There isn’t one, truly. But the mornings are nicer—I wake up and I look at life and think about how beautiful it is. I drink coffee even though I hate it, eat a little too much sugar everyday, and move through the ordinary. I think it’s grace, this silly continuity. But it’s enough to live without choking on the what-ifs of life.

[hungry]

watch me crawl on hands and knees
barely breathing and angry
the kick, the ache, the need
hissing prayers
as fickle as a butterfly that feeds.

silence, it fights and it flees
it can kill or be crushed
maybe calamity scratches
in His throat and He swallows

i am glorious on fire
my throat has been sedated
artemisia—i am not afraid

the darkness i become
it will mould around the mouth

screaming

GIN AND TONIC & RADIUM  

his teeth gnaw me clean off the bone
but i awake with an anger, brightly burned,
my mouth opens ugly and the stars fall from it
i drink my anger like rum, let it burn my heart.

bright red, i am reborn
even the dark cannot look at me

“you survived.”
the old gods chant my name
“they seized you like they did to us.”
feast on the girl i was

HYMENAEUS COMES TO MY DOOR

I cannot remember it anymore, I just live in its consequences—
blessed in the way God will forgive his sins but not mine.
God still feasts with the devil, eats an apple of his own,
an apple that will never plague him like it did Eve.

I am its aftertaste, the rot in his mouth,
the orchard left trembling.

I am born by guilt, I am born from her rib, I am born with a cracked hymen too.

I committed a crime I have no memory of— you silly girl, you seduced him — but my wrists are bound by his nails and this is mercy for my unholiness, an exorcism, and punishment.I asked: for living? No, for letting your blood rush down your thighs before he consumed you, because who would want to leave the Garden of Eden?

TEARS AND AN ENGLISH MUFFIN

ABOUT THE MAN.

I will save you when the darkness swallows us whole.

You will float face-down in the Dead Sea and I will use my body as an anchor to save you even though all you deserve is to remain dead.

I will outgrow you by years.

You will die when I am 27 and by then I’ll have lived too many lifetimes to even try to remember your name until it comes to me on a wicked night in the darkness of my bedframe.

This is not mercy.


ABOUT THE GIRL.

This is not mercy.

I will save you when I remember you still exist somewhere.

You will find the fire cold on your bones and I will wrap you with my insistence and it will be the warmest thing to you.

I will die before you crawl out of the dark.

You will rest with a certainty that your final memory will be peace in the form of a rollerblading Barbie and not depravity in the form of touches in a cage.

*

Samia Mimo is a second-generation Bangladeshi American who finds a home amongst words. Having grown up reading, writing, and thinking a little too much, she has no doubt that she spends too much time inside her head. She writes across multiple genres—most favorably poetry and fiction—about feminism, her personal experiences regarding trauma, and retellings of myth.

Introduction by Emily Liu

In Grace Ma’s poems, she explores how people who live in the same city lead drastically different lives shaped by their expectations, privilege, and troubles. In Ma’s poem “Better Days,” she highlights the contrast between privilege and struggle through the life of a homeless woman. The woman is referred to as ‘she’, keeping her identity vague to represent others facing the same struggles. Ma writes of the comparisons between ladylike “women dressed in their best,” while she becomes “something she’s not” to survive. More comparisons highlight the dangers of being vulnerable at night without a home, where her only protection is her German Shepard. Ma does not resolve her poem with an ending, forcing us to rethink the unknown reality we often overlook when we see homeless people. In “Avenues Away,” Ma uses rhymes and alternating lines to contrast a boy and a girl with opposite resources and mindsets, despite attending the same school. Although their actions mirror each other, the girl has more privileges, such as being able to buy water, take the classes she wants, and being driven home. The girl’s environment of support and choice has cultivated a mindset that encourages learning and curiosity, whereas the boy’s environment has created a limiting mindset, believing “he has no way to advance”. Ma’s poem brings awareness to stark differences between upbringings and privileges that shape a person’s belief in their future. Ma’s poem “hello?” is intentionally unformatted with fragmented lines, portraying the chaos of her sister’s mind. Her sister’s artistic struggles and the societal pressure for it to be perfect consume and isolate her in her room. Written from a sibling’s perspective, it explores themes of misunderstanding, worry, perfectionism, and how they can distance family members. Ma’s poems touch on everyday issues she sees in her life that many can relate to. She writes in powerful rhymes and imagery, evoking emotional understanding, allowing the reader to connect with parts of her writing.

Avenues Away

The blonde haired girl walks down the halls of the shiny waxed floors
The tan skinned boy walks down the halls through the broken doors
She sits next to the window reaching from the ceiling to the ground
He sits next to the smartboard, yet there’s barely any sound
She glances at the textbook shelf, the possibilities are endless
He glances at the textbook shelf, it’s a mess
She grabs an ice cold water from the machine close by
He grabs the knob of the leaky water fountain, maybe it’s still worth a try?
She quickly rushes to change into her gym uniform
He quickly rushes to gym in his regular clothes, it’s the norm
Today she learned how to ballroom dance
Today he learned how he has no way to advance
As she approaches the cafeteria there’s no line
As he approaches the growing line, he begins to whine
For her lunch period, many people bring their own
For him, school provided lunch is all he’s known
She takes a few more classes, all catered to her interests
He takes a few more classes for credits, failing every test
She leaves school in her mode of transportation
He leaves school in his mode of transportation
She turns onto Warren ave in her mom’s car
He turns onto Warren ave too, but home is very far

Better Days

Today she settles in the corner of a bank
The bags left on her usual park bench were snatched away
She watched the officers gather around as her heart sank
Oh well tomorrow will be a better day

The air in mid July was hot
She could not afford to keep her layers on
She folds her long hair into her cap to become something she’s not
In her dreams she pictures a big grand house with a beautiful lawn

It is around four in the morning when two men try to approach
Her german shepherd gets up to bark
The men don’t dare to step any closer as they reproach
Anything can happen in dark

The sun comes quicker than she would’ve liked
She looks across the street at a group of beautiful women dressed in their best
Unlike her, they seem so ladylike
She looks down at her little nest

The day has just begun, but she’s not sure she wants to stay
She glances at herself through the glass doors reflection
Oh well tomorrow will be a better day

hello?

i think my sister has a problem
her room is a mess
crumpled papers
everywhere
each project she works on needs to be perfect
whatever that word means to her
anyways
i dont understand her art
clashing patterns and fabrics
i was taught to never do such a thing
she doesnt listen to anyone
i offer her pages of my old magazines
no
not good enough
how
i think to myself
she’ll work on her pieces
for days at a time
sometimes weeks
we’ve given up on trying
to get her to come downstairs
even for dinner

*

Grace Ma is a junior at Stuyvesant High School who is passionate about bringing light to issues that are usually overlooked. In her free time she enjoys tutoring kids as she believes that they are our future. Her consistent love for learning about all sorts of world history has taught her the injustices of society and the importance of not falling down those paths once again. Her work for this project was heavily influenced by what she sees on a daily basis: homelessness, education inequality, and a lack of support for growing artists. She hopes her poetry will help ease people into facing these harsh realities.

Introduction by Grace Ma and Gavin Cheng

We had the pleasure of reading Emily Liu’s two poems for this Matter issue, and readers, you are in for a treat!

Liu’s first poem “Mulberry Stains” explores the pain of saying goodbye to your childhood home. What does it mean to have it exist only in memory? She begins by characterizing mulberry stains as a reflection of her home, her community, and the joy of sharing, growing, and picking food that her family can eat. She highlights how the good times spent in that house will always be remembered with a hint of bittersweetness. In her old home specifically, fruits and vegetables came fresh from the backyard. Although the house may have seemed far from perfect to an outsider, that home helped her flourish into who she is today. She then goes on to say how urban development has demolished her childhood home as construction companies dug into the ground and “Instead of fighting nature’s persistence, / they choose to erase our tree’s existence.” That home and the families surrounding it will always be part of Liu. Her second poem offers readers a completely new take on her writing.

In “A Heavy Toll” Liu expresses her passion towards environmental preservation by taking us through the horrors of bottom trowling in our oceans. Liu’s poems both address the core idea that humans prioritize development over preserving nature’s gifts. She describes the process “Like a storm tearing through a luscious field, / leaving only a barren disaster,” giving the ecosystem no time to recover before it is repeated again. This piece is both informative and emotional as it walks us through the process while giving a voice to the wildlife that suffers from heartless human practices. Each of her line helps to show the intensity of the practice and the permanence it leaves on our society. 

Mulberry Stains

Wind blusters against oval, serrated leaves.
It grips and tugs, pressuring the weak stems
that feed the ripening mulberries
struggling to cling on.
As the berries surrender the losing battle,
they detach and fall;                                                                                                               
A path of scattered stones beneath awaits.

Worn with regular footprints and nature’s paints,
ridged slabs of stone draw a map,
laying the trail towards home.
Coarse brown dirt interweaves the stone,
where grass grows and ants resurface.

I recollect my upbringing in Fujian, now a sixteen hour flight away.
My home was shined on so brightly it burned,
the only shade brought by looming trees
and under the cover of night.
Fujian soil nurtured our fruits and vegetables–
Persimmon, apple, lychee, mulberry,
each brightly colored fruit brought color to our enclosed community,
each savoured the sun more than any human could.
Squash, watercress, white cabbage,
each grown by a different family but shared together as one.

Our families gathered each summer night,
shaking a giant of a tree with our hanger retriever poles;
Used for laundry, plastic grapples atop of a light-weight stick
clamped onto branches.
With only a slight jerk of the hand,
Berries shook and detached easily.

Overripe mulberries connected and bled,
leaving dark purple splatters as evidence.
They dried into stains,
painting the coarse, brown dirt.

The ones that stay whole
promise simple sweetness.
Without washing or care,
they jump into our mouths
to cool us from the Fuzhou summer heat.

Only now, the same city surrounds two halves,
easily distinguishable by development.
As construction dominates nearby,
our old stone paths guiding the dirt
contrast with freshly poured white canvas;
our three-story community
contrasts with glass skyscrapers ruling the city;
our simple berry tree pressed berries to our windows,
yet from above shrinks into an unintelligible dot–
blurred into the business of the city.

The same community that once held generations of families,
that once bloomed conversations daily,
now separated across the city,
pushed apart by new construction.
Along with that faded the joy,
the joy of gifting plentiful, oversized zucchinis and cucumbers,
the joy of watching Monkey King
on a community 13 inch TV under the moonlight and evening breeze,
the joy of knocking on 10 doors in five minutes,
collecting friends to play in the river.

We were no exception to the urbanization,
impeding towards us.
During construction, the developers knew
the stubborn mulberry stains
would continue to seep into the concrete,
that is if our tree was still standing.
That is nature’s design,
programming mulberries to anticipate
soft dirt to envelope their seeds.
Instead of fighting nature’s persistence,
they choose to erase our tree’s existence.

So as the buildings are struck down,
the mulberry-stained machinery roars
against the audacity of the roots,
when dirt paths are finally suffocated with concrete.
Our blackberry tree is replaced
by a lifeless, stain-free fountain.
Enveloped by a pristine canvas,
glistening, where no life dares to emerge.

A Heavy Toll

Foreign, heavy nylon nets drag along the seabed.
Hungry, greedy, undiscriminating.
Full of man-engineered mechanical power,
the boat tied to the net dominates the ocean waves.
The small, fast-moving, snagging squares
graze coral reefs like pebbles,
sifting through water like air,
striking the sand upwards like explosions.

Like a storm tearing through a luscious field,
leaving only a barren disaster.
Light struggles to pierce through the thick curtain of sand,
to reveal the smallest of fish that slip through the net’s wrath–
left to grieve over the vast emptiness.

Again and again,
Before life can return and begin to dream of flourishing,
An engine hums above once more,
Threading along another thickly woven nylon net to catch ‘loose-ends’.

Bottom trawling, designed to catch cod, but instead
disrupting hundreds of species,
displacing billions of sediments,
clouding meters of the seabed,
suffocating millions of animals,
stealing days of light from plants,
discarding tons of once alive, unwanted fish, like waste.
Their home becoming their resting place too soon,
unnatural deaths marked by our hands.

*

Emily Liu is a Chinese American who grew up in Fujian China, then moved to New York City. She is a Junior at Stuyvesant High School, living in an age where there are more issues than one can bring awareness and change to. As a student passionate about biology and ecology, she often learns and observes human impacts on the environment on a global scale, and also on a personal scale. She hopes to bring awareness and action towards fighting environmental issues, big and small, through poems.

Introduction by Stanislaw Chadrys and Tiffany Troy

Gavin Cheng’s poems uses humor to process the pressure-cooker academic expectations that shaped him. He begins “Calculate this baby” with “When I’m sitting at this cold, hard desk/ talking the SAT, some thoughts escape/ me. ‘Are those who sneeze a lot the most blessed?'” The world of the imagination–in the moments of peace (in distraction, in playing the game of Monopoly “those Saturday mornings” are short-lived) even while pointing to the speaker’s desire for proximity, and a desire to feel ENOUGH.

Calculate this Baby

When I’m sitting at this cold, hard desk
taking the SAT, some thoughts escape
me. “Are those who sneeze a lot the most blessed?”

before ringing myself back in to the math
wiggling around on my screen
like a cry for help.

My calculator is taunting me with all
different symbols, begging me to
understand. Yet it just doesn’t happen.
Maybe I need a break.

I take a trip down my brain’s
rabbit hole into nothingness. You know
what people always say? The richest people
never did well in school.

Words flow like a river that creeps into a
big and beautiful ocean. Numbers are the big,
ugly dam in the way of that path. Blocking all the
little fish that are trying to be part of something bigger.

Rage ignites me to focus back up again. The dam
is present for a reason. Maybe the reason is hidden
in variables—why x keeps running away. y do i have to
do this at all?

It still doesn’t work. My mind drifts off,
wandering to places no Standarized
Aptitude Test can measure. Stories I have to
tell and all that I have to say.

I finally know why the dams are there.
Rivers need
a little challenge every so often. 

A Time Away

I remember those Saturday mornings
when we would rise
at the crack of dawn to
build imaginary houses and
hand out fake money like
masters of our own world.

We would never finish the game,
yet it still happened like clockwork
every week. I wonder if you still remember
those simple times.

Those times when I would move my piece
while you were distracted. Properties bought
and hotels sprung to life. But it has all began
to fall.

Do you recognize the laughter
dying in fraying threads?
Can you see the base starting
to tremble?

While I am away for hours on end,
you crawl further away,
stuck on opposite sides of a labyrinth
and unable to find our way back.

I know that we have both began to sprout
but do a sister and brother have to
lose their bond? Before it shatters completely,
how can it be repaired?

When the clock approaches zero,
we will look back feel the weight of
all those fateful Saturdays. Take
a picture because that’s the best
it’s gonna get.

Unlace Those Shoes

He came out of nowhere and knocked me
to the ground. There was a thump but the whistle did
not blow.

Keep going.
Get up.
You can’t complain.
Fight for every loose ball.
Fight for every last scrap.

It’s what my Ah Ma used to tell me. We have to
work for everything because nothing is given. I
could hear her familiar accent, always talking about
how hard she worked to come to America.

Ai ya Gavin, when I was younger I had
to walk 3 miles to go to school. You watch Iphone
all time and Dad drive you to school.

I came out of nowhere and knocked him
to the ground. There was a thump but the whistle
blew.

Stop now.
Sit on the bench.
You did something wrong.
Not fighting hard enough for the ball.
Not fighting hard enough for the scraps.

It’s what my Ah Ma tells me now. Be as
perfect as you can because that’s
the only chance you are going to have. I can
hear her reassuring yet stern tone, always talking
about how she survived in America.

Zhicheng, you compete against so many other
people like you. I own restaurant, can’t go to college.
But you can get Ivy.

Suddenly the gym lights feel too bright.
I’m not doing ENOUGH.

*

Gavin Cheng is a junior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, whose lifelong love for books has inspired him to pursue creative writing of all different genres. As a basketball player himself, he is passionate about sports equity and how gambling intersects with professional sports. Through Writing to Make Change, he hopes to use writing as a tool to spread awareness about these issues. In his free time, he serves as the Vice President of the Stuyvesant Fishing Club, an organization that provides veterans with opportunities to go on fully funded fishing trips.

Introduction by Tiffany Troy

Ilora Bhattacharyya’s “Pixelated red heart” documents the “doomscrolling” emblematic of the post-COVID modern age. Rather than Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale heart, we have the “pixelated red heart” of Instagram and social media, influencers, and fake news. In this way, the mother figure serves to uproot the speaker’s fixation, albeit only momentarily, in the bit-sized lines that mirror the shortened attention span endemic of social media. In “What faith doesn’t feed” and “Silent pleas,” Bhattacharyya attempts to give voice to the women and the animals, and what is surprising about the turns in both poems are the speaker’s ability to connect the visceral shouts of a protest with her own interiority (“Words that shouldn’t be said”) and to make visceral the pain of laboratory animals.

Pixelated red heart

I’m eating dinner at the table
Fork in one hand
Phone in the other
Mindlessly scrolling
Illuminating that red pixelated heart
My digital praise
For these gorgeous
Happy
Perfect
Looking people

Eat this
To look like that
Buy this
Don’t wear that
That’s “out”
But this is “in”
A checklist for existing
Being fed information
That I don’t know is true
But do I really care if it’s true
Because as long as all the boxes are ticked
Then I’m safe
I’m enough

It’s an addiction
That I can’t tear myself away from
This silent self-degradation
It’s swallowing me whole
Consuming me
As if no online presence
Means no presence at all
Because it didn’t happen
If I didn’t post it
Who cares about being in the moment
When I could get a hundred likes
And be praised in the comments
By my followers
My “friends”
For this beautiful
Enviable life
That I’ve carefully curated
A life that’s not really mine

My mom says to put my phone away
At the dinner table
But she just doesn’t understand
Doesn’t understand that I have to
Like and comment and share and respond
That I have to stay present

What faith doesn’t feed

We are in the 21st century.

You say abortion is immoral,
Prohibited in your religion.
So now she doesn’t get a choice,
She doesn’t have a voice.

Why does your God
Dictate her life,
Seal her fate?
Will it be your faith who feeds her child
When she cannot?

You say pro-life,
But not hers.
Not the life,
Not the body
That’s living, breathing,
Fighting, bleeding.

We are in the 21st century,
Yet still we march,
Still we shout,
Words that shouldn’t have to be said:

My body is not yours.
My body is not theirs.
It is mine.

Silent Pleas

Muzzle around the mouth
Chain around the neck
Tail between the legs

Their innocent souls
Consumed by needless pain
That human hands inflict
Their once pure and curious eyes
Now gleam with fear and apprehension
With questions and silent pleas
That they feel so deeply
But can never voice

They wonder what it’s like
To have enough food in their stomach
So they don’t feel their ribs stab
At their tender skin
To have the comfort of a roof overhead
That doesn’t feel cold and confining
Like that of a cage
With no escape in sight

And they wonder how it is
To be touched with gentle hands
To be held with loving arms
To be seen by a pair of eyes
As something worthy
Not expendable
Not disposable
But deserving of the love
They want to give

*

Ilora Bhattacharyya is a student at Stuyvesant High School and a guest editor of Matter Monthly.

Introduction by Shayna Wilson

I am thrilled to introduce Tafheem Ahrar to our Matter readers. In Tafheem’s folio of poetry, he grapples with what it is like to witness others’ lives from a distance, and how to understand experiences beyond one’s own. The first poem focuses on an immigrant mother whose domestic work and sacrifices often go unnoticed. Her choices, such as raising her siblings and giving up her education, model dedication and perseverance for her child, creating a foundation for them to pursue opportunities the mother never had the chance to experience. The second poem explores the discomfort of watching violence in Gaza through a phone while others experience destruction firsthand. Viewing the war from the comfort of home emphasizes the speaker’s inability to act and highlights their privilege in contrast to the lives of others. Lastly, the third poem questions online behavior, showing how constant reposting can weaken the seriousness of real issues by turning them into something temporary or performative, leading the speaker unsure of how to engage meaningfully online. Ultimately, these poems raise questions about seeing others for how they truly are, and what it really means to witness and value other people’s experiences.

DO NOT TURN OUT LIKE ME.

My mother tells me this while tying her scarf,
while her hands float through the pots and pans, rinsing rice.
As she sits down at the end of the day to talk to me
her voice shakes sometimes.
She tells me she should have learned English
and that she never studied
and that she is useless.

Do not turn out like me.
Do not turn out like me.

Ammu, you stay home all day,
our home quiet except for the soft sounds you make
moving from sink, to stove, to laundry basket.

I record our conversations on my phone sometimes. Your laugh floats up between the clatter of lids and spoons. Then your voice grows thin when you talk about the dreams you gave up in Bangladesh.

The schooling you lost to take care of ten.
Your parents who left you behind to move to America.
The siblings you raised and fed because no one else could.
If only I had studied. If only I had learned English, you say.
If only.

At night, when I find you at the kitchen table
your hands finally still

America is different. Here, nobody cares about how much land your family owns. Nobody asks who your cousin is or who your uncle is. They ask what you can do. I cleaned people’s kitchens. It was normal in Bangladesh. I didn’t have much respect or status but that didn’t matter much because I knew what you were capable of. I want you to walk into rooms and feel respected. I want you to have a job where your back doesn’t hurt at night. You will study. You will become what I let go.

Ammu, you think your life is small
because no one clapped
when the clothes were clean because of you
when the meals were ready because of you
because you gave
and gave
and gave.

The truth is, if I ever become the future you wanted for me, it will only be because I spent every step I took toward becoming you.

When the bombs fall in Gaza,
the glow reaches my phone first.
A boy my age runs through smoke,
calling a name the wind carries away.
I sit in a room warmed by a heater
I forget I turned on.

I watch the video twice,
as if repetition might steady something.
The light on my face
feels too clean for what I am seeing.

My day continues the usual way.
School. Homework. Dinner.
His day folds into dust.
I brush my teeth
while a family brushes debris
from a doorway that no longer exists.

I notice how still my walls stay
when I set my phone down.
How easily the quiet returns to me.
How badly it refuses to return to them.

So I keep watching,
not because I know what to do,
but because looking away
feels like another
kind of violence.

At night my room glows blue
from the screen I hold over my chest.
The house is quiet.
My feed is not.

A father carrying his two daughters
appears again,
one in each arm,
their faces turned away from the camera.
He kneels beside their mother
as if placing them gently back into the world.
I lock my phone
but the image stays pressed
against the back of my eyelids.

The next morning there is Sudan,
a red river seen from satellite,
or someone said it was blood.
I still do not know if it was real,
but it did not feel fake
in the way it made me sit up straight.

My feed becomes a row of identical frames,
the same colors, the same captions.
I pause over the repost button,
Sometimes I tap it.
Sometimes I look away.
Sometimes I open a fundraiser
and sit there a moment,
and close it again
before I decide anything.

I talk to my friend about all of this.
How it feels like we have failed people
we have never met.
How silence feels wrong
but speaking feels unsure.
How every crisis becomes a trend
and I am scared
of treating suffering
like a passing moment
in a long, endless feed.

Late at night
I watch my screen dim to black
and I can still hear
the faint tapping of my thumb
searching for the right thing to do
for a world I only touch through glass.

*

Tafheem Ahrar is a Writing to Make Change student at Stuyvesant High School.

Budding Correspondent

While I wait for the presidential election results,
telling myself this can’t happen twice,
that democracy will be dead, as dead

as my grandfather who sat up straight
at West Hudson Hospital in 1969 and said,
Thought I was gone, eh?

I gathered packages of red construction paper,
went with my father to Hotalings in the city
to buy Pravda, only because my grandfather

came from Minsk, but in my imagined job
as twelve-year-old foreign correspondent,
I could read Cyrillic and extend my arms

as bridge between Old and New Country. How
had Grandpa voted in presidential
elections? Did he vote for Al Smith in 1928?

Being a journalist and understanding Russian
could help me understand him, because
his phlegmy hack made it difficult

to hear him in any language. I didn’t know
then he had Yiddish stuck between his teeth,
had to scrape ancient letters from his tongue.

I made a red scrapbook. Presented to my class.
My grandfather died. I wore plaid to his funeral.

Urban Planning

The houses in Zaromb are drunks in Shmul’s Tavern,
gold teeth glinting against mullioned glass,
sweat pouring pine needles from Leshner Forest.

The streets in Zaromb are broken wagon wheel spokes,
whittled wood laid bare without bark, oh, wait,
there’s a chicken crossing Fama Street looking

for the feeding time when it was called Farbasker Street,
after it was called Yossel’s Street, the continuation
of Moshe the Locksmith’s Street as it passed

the Brok cesspool that once surrounded Zaromb
on three sides. Look at the frogs on the lily pad
among the algae that drowned the mezuzot

until the boxes shot up into the linden trees,
their parchments hanging out to dry
the skin of the homes they once protected.

The marketplace in Zaromb is the OK Corral
that lost its High Noon moment because
the sheriff only had the six-pointed star

but no gun. The well stinks of dried grass
lured from the banks of the Brok and dried
dreams crowbarred from cracked thresholds.

All of this produces a town map, that drawing with pencil nib,
slickened with mouse saliva before the cats crawled in
and buried the mice in kitty litter.

*

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet and historian. She is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). Her work has appeared in more than seventy journals, earning her multiple Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Art and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College.