"Sweet Mumbles" by Fiona Hsu
Celebrating Love in the Time of Drowning by Jonathan Endurance
we love with our backs against
this moon-kissed car. hands tucked
beneath the nape thinking how
the government has fucked our lives.
each star a revelation of beautiful moment.
you shut your eyes like a door
with no knob. on the grassy
threshold of this conversation, we are
split sentences finding meanings to each
letter of our lives. while the city sleeps
the stars line its bellybutton with
ambient light. you weave yourself
into a yarn round the hairline of
my chest. in this city we are split
butterfly wings, broken lilies in the wind
of time. because there's nowhere else
to go, i plant myself into your palm
the way the earth absorbs rain.
we invent a world inside our eyes
where each door leads to a paradise
a place where no government lines
cedars on our skin while we breathe,
and no darkness sleeps inside our
thought. in this city, a candlelight
is a wildfire. our ancestors did not
flee because hunger sisters the day,
they flee because what remains of
home is the mouth of a gun.
this moon-kissed car. hands tucked
beneath the nape thinking how
the government has fucked our lives.
each star a revelation of beautiful moment.
you shut your eyes like a door
with no knob. on the grassy
threshold of this conversation, we are
split sentences finding meanings to each
letter of our lives. while the city sleeps
the stars line its bellybutton with
ambient light. you weave yourself
into a yarn round the hairline of
my chest. in this city we are split
butterfly wings, broken lilies in the wind
of time. because there's nowhere else
to go, i plant myself into your palm
the way the earth absorbs rain.
we invent a world inside our eyes
where each door leads to a paradise
a place where no government lines
cedars on our skin while we breathe,
and no darkness sleeps inside our
thought. in this city, a candlelight
is a wildfire. our ancestors did not
flee because hunger sisters the day,
they flee because what remains of
home is the mouth of a gun.
Jonathan Endurance is a Nigerian poet whose work has appeared in or forthcoming in Rattle Magazine, The Cardiff Review, Eunoia Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Indolent Books, The Ellis Review, Ghost City Review, Canvas Literary Journal, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. He was a joint winner of the maiden edition of Calabar Festival Poetry Competition(2016). His unpublished poem won UNESCO Sponsored Prize for the 14th edition of Castello di Duino Poetry Competition, ITALY. Say hello on Twitter @joepoet_.
Fiona Hsu was born in February of 2001 in Orange County, California. She has won first place in Yorba Linda Women’s Club art competition in 2019 with recognition from Congress, Senate, and Assembly, and she is a National Silver Medalist of Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2019. Fiona is currently studying at UCLA as an undergraduate studio art major. Her works capture the aspects of beauty within woeful and melancholic definitions that narrate quaint and odd stories, in which she hopes her art serves as rusty mirrors for her audience—reflecting and reminding them of a quality and/or memory from the past.
Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
