Petals of the Past - Lenora Cook

Memories of August - Debashis Chakrabory 

The Circle and the Thread - Siddiqa Abid 

The First Wheel - Pravy Jha

3 Short Poems - Marcus Slingsby

Expiration Of Mercy//Community Chest//What side will you be on? - Phillip Elliot

The color kayumanggi - Nico Hechanova

Mindset - Zoey Bond

Pantomiming Eyes, My Mental Airport - Pelle Zingel

The Plan of the Universe - Mariam Bukia

The Things We Bury in Each Other - Timothy Ngome

By Lenora Cook

Lenora is poet from a small town in Texas, who often found herself moving and packing. She is a caring girl, who writes a ton.

They fell like whispers against the wind,

Echoes of a time once bloomed.

Pressed in between pages I wasn’t ready to ever close.

Each a fragile memory,

Doomed from the start.

“Don’t forget me” You whispered.

I ignored you,

But my mind ran.

How could I forget you? 

Like asking the Moon to forget the sun.

The beach to forget the shore.

The forest to forget the springs warmth.

Your brown eyes draw lines in my mind.

They were the soil that sprouted the bouquet of flowers that was us.

But that's done.

It's time for change.

Like fall sweeping away spring.

Our petals fell slowly,

But not slow enough for us to notice.

So when someone asks me, “ what's your favorite color?”

My answer will be brown. 

Like the soil we plant our seeds in and let our roots intertwin together.

I’m not ready for a new beginning,

But life doesn’t stop when the trees are cold.

So, i walk into winter,

Carrying spring in my heart.

By Siddiqa Abid 

Siddiqa Abid is a final year student of English language and Literature from Pakistan. She is fascinated by history, literature and art in all its form. She finds beauty in things that are often overlooked—like a smile, a cup of coffee or even a warm gesture.

You and me—we travel in circles,

As circles overlap with others—and

We become friends with one another.

The circle expands, narrows, expands or fades—

And so do we. 

An unexpected meeting with a friend—or

A Lucky escape from an accident 

You call that luck?

I called that a conspiracy—

Of the universe

We are part of—

As pawns in a chess game,

Moved by forces—we know not of. 

Held by delicate threads—

Bonding, moving, stopping

Us at places unknown—

Or with people lone. 

So when the threads become too moist to hold—

The universe decides to let go.

And so does a part of us—

With the people and places once known. 

By Marcus Slingsby

Marcus Slingsby was born in Yorkshire in 1973. During his 20's and early 30's he travelled the world; working the 1st to wander the 3rd. His work has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Jasper's Folly, The Poetry Lighthouse and Flights. He lives in Friesland with his family.

Two

Father of two beds 

where clocks tick 

different least he 

thinks so and so 

is the vulnerability of 

missed seconds where 

establishments falter 

under lies.

Her cries - 

an echo chamber 

I compartmentalize 

appendages of the fanciful 

across my chest at 3 o'clock

the watch by my ear is not my own.

Bully Slash Victim

Dear Peter,

You held my hand

onto a hot radiator

in a cold classroom

years before

the thought had entered

Zuckerberg's mind

that would tell me

forty years too late

that you'd lost 

your brother and

your mam was reeling.

Last Cigarette

Smoke and black 

tea the tailgate 

down, sat with 

an artist & 

soldier; weary eyed 

homesickness is harder 

to draw than 

homelessness.

She could have 

drawn the salmon 

sunset but tells 

me gunpowder and 

sump oil are

the perfect composition 

for death heavy 

clouds.

By Nico Hechanova

Nico Hechanova is a 17-year-old student journalist at a science high school in the Philippines. They write near daybreak in pursuit of direction and honest narratives with a cup of iced coffee by their side.

TITLE: The color kayumanggi

You, a child of kayumanggi

a rich brown complexion

kissed by the color of the trees

of the soil

of the almonds…

of which I, too, sprouted from

devoid of the white forces

of colonial scars

of the hazels that run to 

the solid ground

once gravity runs its effect.

Perhaps we were born into kayumanggi

to be paraded as 

the incarnation of love

of resistance

of tenacity

the color of the burning bush

still forebearing

scattered across the lands

with no room to forget

the envy of the earth.

By Pelle Zingel

Pelle Zingel is an author from Sønderborg in Denmark. Born 2 June 1998. This year ( 2025) he started  at his 6th year at  “ Forfatterakademiet “ which is a  course at the library in Sønderborg, where young authors meet. Pelle is a published poet since 2021. He published his debut poetry collection “ Mental Harddisk X-rays “ in 2022. Pelle has his poetry published in several magazines and anthologies in Denmark, USA and England.

Pantomiming Eyes 

My voice is occupied, but listen to the pantomime in my eyes 

invisible voices of heartbeats, shapes pantomime 

pantomiming sign of emotions in my eyes, no created lies  

my eyes pantomime exactly, how I feel at this time  

the few sunbeams, the barbed wire, around my anatomy 

my eyes pantomime, exactly how I feel at this time  

body wrapped in tapestry of love or depression breaths enemy  

my eyes pantomime, sadness of the lost comedy shine 

my eyes pantomime, exactly how I feel at this time 

in my eyes you can read, the whole emoji alphabet  

drowned by emotions, just can’t talk during feelings climb 

missing the go today, just ready, set  

through the pantomime in my eyes, please read my feelings  

when my eyes are closed, wish I’m wonderfully dreaming. 

My Mental Airport  

Never touching the ground, arrivals-cancelled  

can't land, the runway inside myself 

departures-cancellation, take of keep on puzzled  

my body says I have to take off, into another mind harbour bookshelf 

running so the departures, always taking off  

don’t wanna feel myself, please give me one way ticket affair  

runways in the air, the years flying life so short  

new departures, departing in the air   

destinations eating miles of anatomy-goodbyes   

my low energy getting lower, getting lower  

my body is an airport, always taking off, into new mind flightmode flights  

crashing into and away, into emotionals towers, new day new tower  

engine problems, erasing my life altitude low 

please give me mental deicing mind changing snow. 

By Timothy Ngome

Timothy Ngome is a Kenyan writer and lawyer whose work explores the intersections of human emotion, absurdity, and the quietly surreal. His fiction often blends humor, introspection, and speculative elements to reveal the tenderness and irony of ordinary life. When he isn’t writing, he works in legislative and procedural services and enjoys cycling and community football.

The Things We Bury in Each Other

When Mariah first died, she asked if I could water her plants. Not the sentimental kind of request you make when you are dying, like please take care of my cat, but the practical kind that implies continued existence. She still had two weeks of moisture left in her soil, she said, and it would be wasteful to let it all dry up while she got her bearings in the afterlife. That was Mariah for you. Death never seemed to shake her sense of responsibility.

The first time she called, I was in the kitchen, trying to decide if grief looked better with coffee or gin. The phone buzzed against the counter, and her name lit up as though the universe hadn’t been paying attention to her obituary. “Pick up,” she said before I could form a rational thought. “I can’t talk long. They meter communication now.”

I asked where she was, the way you ask someone where they’ve moved to. She said she didn’t know the name of the place, but it smelled like wet paper and forgotten prayers. She said there were queues for everything. You queued to speak, to listen, even to miss people. “It’s like the old post office,” she said. “Only everyone’s dead and no one gets their letters.” Then she laughed, and for a second I forgot she was gone.

She told me to keep the plants near the window, away from direct light. She said I had to rotate them so they didn’t lean toward the sun the way she used to lean toward sleep, half willing, half afraid. Then she hung up. I stood there for ten minutes staring at my phone, wondering if grief came with roaming charges.

By the third call, I had stopped asking how she was. It seemed pointless. She always gave the same answer: “Present, more or less.” Instead, I asked what death felt like. She said it was like moving into a house that someone else had already decorated and you’re not allowed to change the furniture. You walk through the rooms and realize all the mirrors are tilted just enough to make you wonder what you actually look like.

When she was alive, we had perfected the art of almost loving each other. We collected promises the way children collect sea shells—beautiful, empty, and always a bit cracked. I used to tell her that love was like recycling: good for the environment, exhausting for the participants. She would roll her eyes and say that I treated affection like a tax deduction. And yet, she stayed. Maybe because leaving me felt like rearranging the furniture—too much effort for too little satisfaction.

After her funeral, people kept telling me to move on. As if grief were a treadmill and I was simply too lazy to increase the speed. I nodded, smiled, thanked them for their wisdom, and went home to water her ferns. I never told anyone she called. The living get uncomfortable when the dead refuse to follow protocol.

The calls kept coming, sporadic, unpredictable, like poor radio reception. Sometimes she sounded close, other times distant, her voice muffled by static that hummed like the ocean inside a shell. Once, she asked if I had started dating. I told her I was seeing someone new, though I wasn’t. She laughed and said, “Good. Don’t let me haunt your love life.” I wanted to tell her that haunting was precisely what she was doing, but the line went dead before I could.

One evening she said she was learning how to forget. “It’s harder than it looks,” she told me. “They say you have to unremember the living one memory at a time. Like peeling an onion, only you’re the one crying.” I asked if she had started unremembering me. She paused for a long time, then said, “Not yet. You’re at the center somewhere. It’ll take a while to get there.” Then she whispered, “But don’t wait for me.”

The plants began to wither, not because I neglected them, but because they seemed to sense that their owner had abandoned the biological contract. I replaced them one by one, thinking that perhaps if I kept the apartment green enough, she might find her way back. The absurdity of it was not lost on me. A rational man doesn’t cultivate resurrection through horticulture. But then again, a rational man doesn’t take calls from the afterlife.

One day, months later, she didn’t call. Nor the next. I stopped keeping my phone charged, stopped watering the replacements, stopped pretending that her absence was temporary. I started dreaming about her though—dreams where she was not dead but dissolving, her edges fraying like an old photograph. In one, she was sitting across from me at our favorite café, sipping tea that evaporated as she lifted the cup. She smiled and said, “See? Nothing holds for long.” I woke up with the taste of ashes on my tongue.

The government issued new guidelines on afterlife communication around that time. There had been reports of overattachment—people refusing to live because their dead loved ones wouldn’t stop calling. They said it caused emotional congestion on both sides. Too many unfinished conversations. Too much longing bleeding through the signal. I read the bulletin and thought of Mariah, wondering if she had been cut off for my own good.

A week later, I received a letter. A real one, on paper that smelled faintly of ozone. The envelope was postmarked “Elsewhere.” Inside was a single page with her handwriting: Stop waiting for the phone to ring. They’ve reassigned me. It’s quieter here. Thank you for the light. I read it a dozen times before I realized she never signed it.

I tried to move on, as they say. I dated a woman named Ruth who collected antique spoons and believed that love was proof of reincarnation. She had this theory that every person you love deeply is someone you once buried in another life. I didn’t tell her that Mariah had literally been buried, that I had watched the earth swallow her with the precision of a closing door. Instead, I smiled, nodded, and pretended to believe in second chances.

But you cannot love the living when you are fluent in the dead. You keep expecting them to vanish mid-sentence, to call from numbers that no longer exist. Ruth once caught me watering a pot of soil that had nothing planted in it. She asked what I was doing, and I said, “Waiting for something to grow.” She didn’t laugh. We stopped seeing each other soon after.

Years later, I moved to a smaller apartment. I took only what mattered: a box of old photographs, the letter from Elsewhere, and a single surviving plant. I placed it by the window, exactly where she would have wanted it. Sometimes, in the thin hours of the night, when the world forgets to breathe, I hear the faintest vibration from my phone. I never answer. Some absences deserve their own silence.

But one thing I couldn’t do was stop thinking about her. 

I think about her still. About how death, like love, doesn’t always know when to leave. About how we bury pieces of each other the way trees bury roots, deep enough that even when the trunk falls, something remains underneath, quietly insisting on growth.

Sometimes I think grief is just a bad habit we never learn to quit. You keep telling yourself you’ll stop tomorrow, that one last thought won’t hurt, and before you know it, you’re relapsing into memory like an old song you never actually liked but can’t stop humming.

The plant by the window had grown strange. Its leaves were darker than they should have been, almost metallic, and they made a faint clicking sound at night, like teeth chattering in the cold. I told myself it was the wind, though the window stayed shut. I watered it anyway, less out of hope and more out of superstition. In a world where the dead wrote letters, who was I to question a noisy plant?

One evening, the streetlights flickered the way they do when the world is about to confess something. The air smelled like wet iron, and the phone began to ring. It wasn’t the usual soft vibration but a long, deliberate trill, like a question that refused to end. I froze. It had been years. I thought of the letter, the reassignment, the quiet she’d promised herself. But I answered.

“Hello?”

There was no voice at first, only the faint hum of something alive and listening. Then, softly, as if spoken through a wall of mist, “You shouldn’t have kept it.”

“Kept what?” I asked.

“The plant.”

I wanted to say it was the only thing left of her, but the words stuck to my tongue. The line cracked, split, then steadied again. Her tone was sharper now, less like Mariah, more like the echo of her. “It isn’t mine anymore,” she said. “They grow differently where I am. What you watered has roots elsewhere now.”

I looked at the plant. The leaves were moving, curling inward, folding like hands in prayer. The soil pulsed, just once, as though something beneath it had remembered how to breathe.

“Mariah,” I said, “where are you?”

Silence. Then a whisper: “Still here.”

And the call ended.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I sat by the window watching the plant move under the moonlight, its leaves tilting toward me as if to listen. At some point, I must have drifted off, because when I woke, there was dirt on the floor. The pot lay tipped on its side, the roots exposed, but they didn’t look like roots anymore. They looked like hair. Black, fine, and familiar.

I didn’t touch it. I told myself I’d clean it later, maybe repot it, maybe throw it away. But every time I approached, a low sound filled the room, something between a sigh and a heartbeat. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant, like the room itself had learned to breathe.

Two days later, a neighbor knocked to complain about the smell. I hadn’t noticed it until she mentioned it—something faintly sweet, like flowers left too long in water. I lied and said I had spilled fertilizer. She wrinkled her nose, muttered something about tenants who never open their windows, and left. I closed the door and leaned against it, the air heavy with something I couldn’t name.

That evening, the phone rang again. This time the caller ID said “Unknown.” I hesitated, then answered.

“It’s me,” said a voice that was not hers but knew how to pretend.

“Who is this?”

A pause. “You buried her wrong.”

I wanted to laugh, to say I had nothing to do with the burial, that the earth did what it always does. But instead I asked, “What do you mean?”

“She wanted the sea. Not soil. Not you standing there pretending to be the last person who knew how to love her.”

The voice trembled, cracked, then vanished into static. I stood there listening to the silence that followed, long enough to realize I was shaking.

After that, I started seeing things. At first just shapes reflected in the glass, then clearer outlines—a hand pressed against the inside of the window, fingers long and thin, smudged with soil. Once, while brushing my teeth, I saw her reflection behind me, her face half in shadow, lips moving as though reciting something. I turned, but no one was there.

I told myself grief was playing tricks again. That’s what people say when the world stops obeying reason: you’re imagining things. But imagination had never left soil on my floor before.

The next week I decided to move. I packed the essentials and avoided looking at the plant, which now seemed less plant than presence. When I lifted the pot, the roots clung to the floorboards, thin tendrils snaking into the cracks. I pulled gently, then harder, until something gave. A drop of dark liquid slid across my wrist, warm as blood. I froze, then slowly wiped it away with a towel.

That night, one final call came.

“I told you not to wait for me,” she said.

It was her voice this time—soft, exhausted, too human to be memory.

“I didn’t,” I lied.

“You did. And now you’ve made a place for me.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the line filled with a low hum that wasn’t static. It was breathing, slow and deliberate. Then, faintly: “Let me in.”

The lights flickered. The plant shivered. Every leaf turned toward me like an eye widening in recognition. I stepped back, tripped over the box by the door, and fell hard enough to rattle the picture frames. When I looked up, the soil was moving. Not writhing, but opening, the way a wound opens when it realizes it will never heal.

I dropped the phone. It buzzed once, then went still. I crawled toward the door, half crawling, half running, my pulse drumming louder than the breathing in the room. I didn’t look back. I didn’t have to.

Outside, the night was quiet, too quiet, like the world was holding its breath. I stood there barefoot, covered in dust, watching the light under the door flicker like a heartbeat. For a moment, I thought I heard her voice again, not from the phone, not from the apartment, but from inside my chest—soft, amused, impossibly near.

“You kept me alive,” it said. “Now you have to keep me.”

The sound faded, replaced by the gentle clicking of leaves in the wind.

It’s been weeks since that night. The landlord says someone new has moved into the apartment. I see the lights on sometimes, warm and steady. No noise, no calls, no strange smells. Just life continuing, as if nothing ever happened.

But every now and then, when I walk past, I catch a faint hum beneath the floorboards. Like a voice rehearsing forgiveness. Or a root remembering the way back home.

And sometimes, when I water the new plant in my new apartment, I swear the soil whispers her name.