By Nafisa Tafannum 

Nafisa Tafannum is a young student artist from Bangladesh who enjoys expressing ideas and emotions through visual art. She began drawing at the age of nine and has developed a passion for sketching, painting, and creative storytelling through imagery.

Her artworks are often inspired by nature, landscapes, and the beauty of the ocean. Through color and atmosphere, she explores themes of emotion, hope, and imagination in her work.

"This artwork explores a quiet journey across a midnight sea. The dark ocean represents stillness, uncertainty, and emotional numbness. A small ship moves forward through the deep waters toward a distant light on the horizon.

The piece reflects the theme 'Thaw,' where hope does not arrive suddenly but slowly begins to return. The gradual movement from darkness toward light symbolizes the slow awakening of feeling and the gentle reappearance of hope.

The artwork was created using drawing and painting techniques with careful blending of deep blue tones to capture the calm yet powerful atmosphere of the night ocean."

By Miel

Miel is a young Bangladeshi girl who explores and expresses her thoughts through photography, art, and writing. She enjoys capturing small moments, observing people, and expressing the emotions that shape her daily life. Her work highlights her introspective nature and growing dedication to creative expression.

Your poison bled through my cracks, yet I remained unscathed.

Curious and unfamiliar, I let myself be engulfed by you as I sank deeper and deeper.

Unbeknownst to me of what would follow; or so an arcane meant only for me to unfold.

I find myself wondering,

Maybe it wasn’t poison?

The peculiarity of being cherished felt undeserving of me.

Like a sheep beside a wolf, I trembled at every graze it left upon my soul.

My ignorance pleads guilty as I step beyond my comfort, letting time tick as I slowly let myself be free.

A dalliance at dawn, yet a dither in my mind; still, I find myself glad when you’re finally mine.

The reassurance I craved was within you all along, a sun who wears his heart on his sleeve,

Bathing me in his warmth while asking for none in return.

And so, I wistfully hope my autumn leaves bring comfort to your winter veils;

As you bid goodbye to summer, the one whom I’ll never be.

An amity ending in aubade,

You leave me be with the greatest gift one could beget.

By Adan Khan

I used to know them, they were words

I used to bow them, they were words

They gave me power, they were words

They make me proud, they were words;

Now they suck, they are words

Now they hurt, they are words 

Make me fall, they are words 

Make me lose, they are words;

One that give wounds,they will be words

One that destroy me, they will be words

One that break my body,they will be words 

One that kill my soul, they will be words.

By Nishka Kripalani

Nishka is a fifteen-year-old writer and artist from Dubai with a big imagination and an even bigger love for creativity. Whether she’s filling pages with stories or sketching out new ideas, she enjoys expressing herself through both writing and art. Outside of that, Nishka keeps busy with a variety of hobbies. She loves baking sweet treats in the kitchen, learning and playing songs on the guitar, and stepping into different roles through acting. These interests all give her different ways to explore storytelling—whether it’s through words, music, or performance. She is currently celebrating a big milestone: graduating high school (she survived, yay!) and preparing to move on to senior school. It’s an exciting new chapter filled with new experiences, ideas, and opportunities to grow both creatively and academically. Nishka hopes to continue writing and sharing more of her work in the future. With many stories still waiting to be told, she looks forward to publishing more of her creations and letting readers step into the worlds she imagines.

The house was already breathing when she arrived.

Not literally, of course—but the walls seemed to pulse with the rhythm of music, bass pressing softly through the plaster like a second heartbeat. The living room had been stripped of most of its furniture to make space for bodies. Someone had dragged neon tube lights from another room and leaned them against the walls so that everything glowed in diluted blues and pinks. Shadows slipped across the ceiling as people moved, laughter rising and dissolving into the music. It smelled faintly of alcohol, warm air, and something electric.

She stood near the doorway for a moment, letting the room settle around her.

A friend shouted something over the music and pulled her forward, through the narrow hallway and into the living room where the crowd thickened. The floor vibrated lightly beneath her shoes. Someone was already dancing on the coffee table. People moved in loose circles, arms lifted, heads thrown back in laughter that blurred into the next song. It was the kind of night where everything felt temporary in the best way.

Nothing serious. 

Nothing heavy. 

Just a house packed too full of people who had decided, collectively, that the world outside could wait until morning. 

She slipped easily into the rhythm of it. A drink appeared in her hand from somewhere. Someone spun her once in the middle of the room and vanished again. The lights shifted colors with the music, painting every face in flickering hues that made it impossible to focus on any one thing for too long.

And that was good. 

Because nights like this were meant to be simple.

Move. Laugh. Forget.

For a while, it worked. She danced with her friends, loose and careless. The music was loud enough that conversation had to be shouted, which meant no one really talked about anything important. Every moment existed only for the length of the beat before the next one replaced it.

Someone bumped into her, apologizing with a grin before disappearing into the crowd again. The air grew warmer as more bodies filled the room, windows fogging slightly with breath and movement, and still the music kept going. She tilted her head back, letting it wash through her. For a moment, there was nothing but color and sound.

Then she looked up.

Across the room—past the blur of moving shoulders and raised hands—someone else had stopped dancing. At first, it barely registered. Just another person pausing in the crowd. But then their gaze locked. And the room shifted. Not dramatically. Nothing visible changed. The music still pounded from the speakers, someone nearby still laughed too loudly, glasses clinked against the kitchen counter behind her.

But something invisible tightened in the air between them.

Because she knew that face.

Not in the vague, distant way you sometimes recognize people from school hallways or mutual friends. Not the polite familiarity of someone you’ve met once or twice before. 

This was different. This was the kind of knowing that lives somewhere deeper. The kind that sits quietly in the back of your mind for months—years, sometimes—without asking for attention. Until suddenly it has it.

They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Long enough that memory had begun to soften the edges of things. Long enough that entire seasons had passed without either of them appearing in the other’s life. Long enough that it should have felt distant.

It didn’t.

Across the room, he stood very still. He had been dancing moments ago too—one hand loosely raised, head tipped toward whoever he’d had been talking to. But now he wasn’t moving at all. His eyes had landed in the same place. On her. No dramatics, no wide expressions, no sudden gestures.

Just recognition, quiet and immediate. The kind that arrives before logic has time to catch up. For a second—maybe less than that—the music seemed to soften around them. Fading, pulling back just enough that everything else in the room blurred at the edges. Because once you’ve known someone like that, your mind doesn’t hesitate. 

It remembers.

It remembers the way their voice sounded at two in the morning through a phone speaker. The quiet rhythm of conversations that stretched long past the point where either of you had anything important left to say. It remembers laughter in empty parking lots. Messages sent at unreasonable hours. The strange intimacy of talking about everything and nothing with someone who somehow understood both.

Those memories didn’t arrive one by one. They rushed in all at once, like a door that had been closed too loosely finally giving way.

Across the room, he shifted slightly. Just enough that the neon light caught the side of his face. And suddenly it was painfully easy to imagine a different version of this night. One where they were standing next to each other instead of separated by a crowded living room. One where their shoulders brushed casually while someone handed them both drinks. One where they leaned in close to say something over the music, laughing because neither of them could hear properly. That version of the night existed somewhere.

Just not here.

Because the truth was simpler.

They had once known each other in a way that felt rare, effortless.

Late nights had slipped into early mornings without either of them noticing. Conversations had wandered through memories, dreams, fears, ridiculous hypothetical questions that only made sense after midnight. There had been a kind of quiet understanding between them. The sort that makes time feel strangely flexible. As if the world outside their conversations had paused slightly while they talked. And maybe that was why it had mattered so much. Because nothing about it had been forced. It had just been there.

Until it wasn’t.

No one in the room tonight knew that history. To everyone else, they were just two people who had happened to look up at the same time. But between them, something older lingered. Not anger. Not even regret, exactly. Just the unmistakable awareness that once—at some point—they had stood much closer to each other than they did now.

The music swelled again as the song changed.

Someone bumped lightly into her shoulder, pulling her half a step sideways before continuing through the crowd. The interruption should have broken the moment.

It didn’t.

Because he was still looking at her. Not intensely. Not searching for anything.

Just… looking.

And suddenly, it felt strangely quiet inside her head. She noticed small things.

The way the neon lights painted faint streaks of color across the ceiling. The slow spin of the fan above the room, pushing warm air in lazy circles. The subtle rhythm of the music vibrating through the floorboards. And across it all, that single line of sight stretching between the two of them.

Memory does strange things when it’s given the opportunity. It doesn’t present events in order. It doesn’t separate the important from the trivial. It just gathers moments and places them side by side.

A conversation on a dark street.

A message that arrived exactly when it was needed.

A shared joke that no one else would understand.

Those things linger long after the larger story disappears. And standing there, surrounded by strangers and music and flashing lights, it became impossible not to feel the weight of that quiet history. Because some people don’t fade cleanly from your life. Even after time has done its best to move things forward. Even after distance has rewritten the daily routine. They remain somewhere in the background. Like a thread you forgot existed until you accidentally pull on it again. Across the room, he exhaled softly. His gaze didn’t break.

But something in his expression shifted.

Not sadness. Not happiness. Just recognition.

The kind that says: Yes. That happened. 

And maybe, silently: I remember too.

Someone nearby started cheering as the music built toward the chorus. Arms lifted. The crowd swayed closer together, people moving instinctively toward the center of the room. The space between them narrowed slightly as bodies shifted around them. Still, they didn’t move. 

For a moment—just a moment—it felt as though the entire room had tilted gently around the two of them. As if every laugh, every flashing light, every vibrating speaker had stepped a few inches backward to make space for something quieter. Because connection, when it’s real, doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it exists only in the smallest gestures. 

A glance held half a second longer than necessary. A memory resurfacing unexpectedly. The silent agreement between two people that a moment once mattered.

And maybe still does.

The music reached its loudest point. Someone grabbed her hand, spinning her in a quick circle with a burst of laughter. The motion broke her stillness, pulling her briefly back into the movement of the room.

But when she turned again, breath catching slightly—he was still there. Still watching. Just as aware. For a brief, impossible second, it felt like the rest of the night had disappeared completely. Like they were standing alone in a room made entirely of memory. The laughter. The music. The flashing lights. All of it faded to something distant and muffled.

And all that remained was the quiet realization of what they had once been to each other.

Not lovers, exactly. Not strangers either. Something stranger than both. Something unfinished. Something that had slipped through their hands not because it wasn’t real—but because timing, life, circumstance, all the messy invisible forces that shape people’s lives had pulled them in different directions.

Right person.

Wrong time.

The phrase had always sounded too simple. But standing there now, it felt almost accurate. Because nothing about the connection itself had ever been the problem.

The moment stretched. Thin and fragile. Then someone shouted near the speakers. The song shifted abruptly. And just like that—the room rushed back.

The bass slammed into the floorboards again. Voices rose in laughter. Someone spilled a drink and cursed loudly while their friends doubled over laughing. The spell shattered.

He blinked once, glancing briefly toward someone calling his name from the side of the room. When his gaze returned—she was already dancing again.

Moving with the rhythm like everyone else in the room.

As if nothing had happened.

For a moment longer, he stood still.

The memory of that silent exchange still humming faintly in his chest. Then someone grabbed his arm, pulling him back toward the center of the room. 

“Come on,” his friend laughed, shouting over the music. “This song’s good.”

He let himself be pulled forward. The lights flashed pink and blue again. Bodies moved. The night continued exactly the way it had before. 

Across the room, she disappeared briefly behind a group of dancers. And when she reappeared a moment later, she was laughing at something someone had said.

Just another person at the party.

Just another night.

The music kept playing.

And slowly, gently, the moment folded itself back into memory.

By Hattie King

A moment

The small things - they mean everything

A stained tea cup on a nightstand

An invitation inside, shelter from the rain

A question, a hug, a compliment

A hand, a messy room - me and all my imperfection

You and yours

By Olúsola Oyedéle Oladéji 

Olúsola Oyedéle Oladéji is a Nigerian writer, communications strategist, and author of The Loner, a literary novella about a street girl navigating sexual violence and institutional abandonment in urban Nigeria. A final-year Mass Communication student specialising in Public Relations and Advertising at Kwara State University, she writes at the intersection of lived experience, gender justice, and structural analysis. Her work has been recognised with the Campus Journalism Author of the Year Award (2025), the ARCON Most Compelling Pitch Award (2025), and the KWASU Best Marathon Writer Award (2023). She writes from Abuja, Nigeria, and is available for remote collaborations globally.

"Same Boxes, Unequal Heights grew out of a frustration I could not shake, the quiet exhaustion of watching equality celebrated while equity remained an afterthought. As a Nigerian woman navigating education, communications, and the literary world simultaneously, I have lived the gap between what equal access promises and what it actually delivers. The article began as a single line I kept returning to giving everyone the same box will never make them equally tall. From there, the argument built itself.

I wrote this piece the way I write everything, starting with the feeling, then finding the framework to hold it. The Latin roots of equality and equity were an entry point that grounded the emotional argument in something precise and intellectual. The UN Women data gave it teeth. The workplace, education, and political sections each came from real observations, systems I have watched fail women not through malice but through indifference to difference.

My background is in Mass Communication, PR, advertising, and strategic storytelling, and that shapes how I write. I think constantly about framing: who is being spoken to, who is being spoken about, and whether those are the same person. With this piece, I wanted the woman reading it to feel seen before she finished the first paragraph. I hope it lands that way."

SAME BOXES, UNEQUAL HEIGHTS: RETHINKING GENDER EQUALITY THROUGH EQUITY

For decades, the world has clamoured for gender equality, a vision of men and women standing side by side with the same rights, opportunities, and recognition. Yet beneath this noble cry lies a subtle flaw: equality, which when pursued without context, assumes that everyone begins from the same starting point. In truth, society has never been an even field. It is a system layered with privilege, bias, and unequal access and thus, giving everyone the same box to stand on will never make them equally tall.

The word equality finds its root in the Latin aequalis, meaning ‘even’ or ‘uniform.’ It implies sameness in rights, quantity, or value. Equity, on the other hand, stems from aequitas, meaning ‘fairness’ or ‘justice.’ Unlike equality, equity acknowledges differences in experience, circumstance, and need, and seeks to distribute resources in a way that corrects those imbalances without assumptions.

Applied to gender, these words take on urgent significance. The global plea for gender equality is not misplaced, it represents a long-overdue demand for fairness in education, politics, work, and family life. Yet what many fail to realise is that equality cannot simply be handed out; it must be built upon the foundation of equity. Women and men do not face identical social conditions. Historical bias, economic disparity, cultural expectations, and unequal access to opportunity create barriers that equality alone cannot break. In my book, ‘The Loner’, I once wrote: ‘The world preaches fairness yet builds walls where bridges should stand.’ That line captures the paradox of modern justice, a society that claims to give everyone an equal chance but rarely removes the obstacles in their way.

WHY EQUALITY ALONE FAILS WOMEN

The pursuit of gender equality has long been painted as the ultimate victory for women’s rights. Yet beneath this chorus of sameness lies a quiet truth: equality alone cannot correct what history has distorted. Because women and men have never stood on the same starting line, the promise of equal treatment often overlooks unequal realities.

Consider the workplace. Equality demands that both men and women receive the same job opportunities and salaries for the same roles. On paper, this sounds fair. But equity asks deeper questions, who has access to those jobs in the first place? Who bears the invisible cost of unpaid care, of maternity, of cultural expectation? According to UN Women, women globally perform nearly three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. That difference, ‘unseen and unpaid’ directly affects their ability to compete equally in the formal economy. Equality may give both genders the same office desk; equity ensures the woman has a fair chance to sit at it.

The same principle plays out in education. In many parts of the world, both boys and girls technically have ‘equal access’ to schooling. Yet millions of girls still drop out due to cultural restrictions, early marriage, or the absence of menstrual hygiene facilities. Equality says the classroom door is open to all; equity ensures every girl can walk through it without shame or barrier.

Even in political representation, the illusion of equality persists. Many democratic systems boast equal voting rights, that women can run for office just like men. But equality cannot erase the intimidation, funding disadvantages, or gender bias that keep women from contesting freely. Where equity is absent, equal rights become symbolic gestures, not transformative change.

Cultural expectations deepen this imbalance. Society still views ambition differently across genders. A man’s assertiveness is leadership; a woman’s is pride. A man’s dedication to work is commitment; a woman’s is neglect of family. Equality cannot rewrite these perceptions, only equity can challenge and reshape them through education, advocacy, and structural reform.

Equity, therefore, is not a threat to equality; it is its most faithful ally. It ensures that equality does not remain a privilege for those already advantaged but becomes a reachable reality for those held back by systemic bias. To ask for equity is not to ask for favouritism, it is the recognition that justice must first heal before it can balance.

EQUITY AS THE REPAIR PROCESS

If equality is the ideal of a just world, equity is the tool that builds it. It is the slow, deliberate process of repair, the patient mending of wounds that centuries of gender imbalance have left behind. While equality calls for uniform access, equity seeks to fix what has been unevenly broken. It acknowledges that some groups have been held back not by lack of potential, but by systems designed without them in mind.

In education, gender equity does not stop at offering girls the same textbooks as boys. It involves addressing the reasons why girls are more likely to drop out: poverty, early marriage, domestic expectations, or lack of safety on the way to school. It means creating scholarships targeted at young women, ensuring mentorship programmes for female students, and designing learning spaces that build confidence rather than silence it. Equity builds scaffolds where equality merely hands out ladders.

In workplaces, equity challenges structures that unconsciously favour men, the after-hours meetings scheduled when many women must be home caring for families; the maternity breaks seen as professional weaknesses; the leadership roles often assigned to those with fewer domestic obligations. True gender equity does not demand that women behave like men to succeed; it demands that systems evolve to accommodate both without bias. Flexible work hours, parental leave for all genders, and pay equity policies are all steps in this repair process.

Politically, equity means more than the right to vote or run for office. Some nations have implemented gender quotas, not as charity, but as correction. These measures are not about granting unearned advantage; they are about restoring visibility to half of humanity whose perspectives have been historically silenced. Equity ensures that decisions about women are not made without women.

But perhaps the deepest form of equity happens not in laws or workplaces, but in minds, in the quiet reshaping of perception. When boys are raised to see leadership as genderless, and girls are encouraged to see strength as human and not masculine, the process of repair begins at its most crucial level: culture. Laws can open doors, but only equity in thought ensures everyone walks through them freely.

CONCLUSION: BALANCING THE SCALE

Equality is the destination; equity is the journey. To seek equality without equity is to build a house on uneven ground, no matter how beautiful its walls, it will not stand.

Our systems, in education, work, politics, and culture, must move beyond the illusion of sameness and embrace fairness that considers difference. When a woman is offered maternity leave, it is not a privilege; it is equity at work. When a girl in a conservative village receives a scholarship meant only for girls, it is not favoritism; it is repair. When leadership quotas reserve space for women, it is not pity; it is correction. These are the steps that pave the road toward equality that is not symbolic but lived.

Equity reminds us that fairness is not achieved by pretending differences do not exist, but by respecting them and designing systems that accommodate them. It is justice in motion, an evolving, adaptive process that seeks not uniformity, but balance. And through that balance, gender equality ceases to be a dream and begins to take shape as reality.

‘Equality gives everyone the same box. Equity builds the right height for each.’

When the ground is finally levelled, both men and women will see over the fence, not because they were treated the same, but because they were treated justly. Only then can we say that gender equality has truly been achieved: not as an ideal written on paper, but as a lived reality, fair and free.

References

UN Women (2020). Unpaid Care and Domestic Work.  https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/unpaid-work

By Jennifer Grant

The feeling of Ruby’s skin comforts Charles more than a blanket. Her body no longer craves his physical companionship. She only meets his flesh accidentally, like when she passes him her finished bowl of soup and their hands graze. When she lies sleeping, Charles lifts her cold bony legs across his and pretends their day has gone well.

Charles isn’t sure whether Ruby will survive the winter. Every winter since she turned 80, she begs to die, but this year, he really thinks she might. She has no interest in most activities; eating has also become a chore. Thin soups with peas and small dices of potato are all she’ll allow between her lips. Her frame is so faint that she reminds her husband of the white linen drapery throughout their home. Ruby had selected the airy material when she still cared to witness the arc of light from morning till night. If not for Charles, she would have kept the windows bare. The different shades of sky that bead through the drapery haven’t been lost on Charles. He still stands before the gauzy fabric and allows his skin to collect the streams of light that float onto him like silken ribbons.    

Cold light travels through their home, draining vitality from colours and character from patterns into nothing more than dull whispers of how they once were. Charles can see the coldness set inside his wife, like the rivers of her blood have frozen in the same manner as the waters outside. The aches in his body sharpen from the cold, but not in the same way as Ruby. She cannot escape her pain; there’s no place for her mind to travel to offer a moment of refuge. Charles reads the books that clutter the shelves of their home. Every two years, he re-reads them in the order that Ruby once organized, if there was any order at all. Most of the books are hers. The pages are creased where she had folded down the corners, some of the passages are underlined zealously in ink. These are the parts he reads over and over, his mind cradling the words like a mother with her heavy-eyed baby pressed into her chest.

Ruby has eaten even less this winter. Shadows live inside the valleys of her face. Charles fills her hollows with stories about the sun: he promises that it won’t be long before its return. The sun is always worth living for. 

But how can he expect the sun to wait for them another year? If Ruby dies before then, surely he’ll die soon after her. His eyes catch his curved shadow on the wall and he wonders how long his back has been bent like this. He spends his days trapping and releasing a mouse that he hears rummaging in the walls, as though he’s rearranging his own home furniture. A mouse, he tells himself, must be the same one. When he doesn’t hear this mouse or Ruby’s moans of pain, he collapses into his grief, which waits like a vulture for his times of stillness. 

He thinks about death more than usual. Into the chasm of night, he hears himself praying for their end. Outside, the world is still, as if the earth has inhaled, holding its breath like a secret buried within its chest. His old farmhouse stands proud and unchanged, just like the people before, it will outlive him. There is no civilization for miles; if his wish for death were granted and he were to keel over in the snow like a sack of potatoes, God knows how long it would be until he’d be found. He hears the caws from a crow outside and follows this sound until he locates the black bird curiously hopping atop the snow. When he returns to Ruby, he tells her about the crow and how he charged in its direction to see if it would fly. If it flew, it was confirmation that he wasn’t dead after all. Ruby stares at him silently, her eyes flat like unglazed ceramic. Later he feels guilty for saying such an awful thing; she isn’t deserving of his misery. 

Different forms of the sun come in the winter. So rare is its appearance that Charles wonders whether he’s imagined its sighting. No, it must be true—this light hasn’t ripened as it will in the later months. It’s a winter’s sun, glowing faintly beneath the velvet layers of white sky. Oh, what a sight to behold! With an enthusiasm that is no longer manufactured, he sits at Ruby’s bedside and tells her that they must live to see the spring. 

The cold drags past February into the heart of April. Charles bets that he and Ruby look as sickly as the 18th-century shipmen after they’ve been trapped aboard their ship, suffering from scurvy. When they stand, their bones dangle below their necks as though they’re wooden puppets dependent on the crude manipulation of strings. Glimpses of the sun continue, but he’ll wait for their encounter until it bursts from the sky like dynamite. 

The day arrives in the middle of May. Light rises from the crevasses of the earth in waves of burnished gold. From behind the curtain of the window, the brown of Charles’s eyes swirls with rings of fire. The sunlight floods into their home, painting the walls and lapping over the floorboards like poured honey. The colours sing, the patterns dance, and the listless rooms are repurposed into brilliant, gilded cubes.          

Charles dresses Ruby and himself in their white tunics which fall over them like hanging bedsheets, moving and rippling in the wind. They drag their wooden legs across the dilapidated land, stopping at the top of a hump that curves gracefully from the ground like a rolling ocean wave. They drape themselves across the dry grass with their sunken faces pointed at the sun. Ruby’s hand is atop his, even though he hadn’t placed it there. Ruby’s body begins to tremble as her see through skin turns lambent. She is laughing and laughing, and the hole of her mouth looks as though it’s eating the sunlight.  

Charles laughs too so he can also swallow the sunlight. He closes his eyes to picture Ruby as she was before. His love for her washes over him; there was a time when she was his sun. The sound of Ruby’s joy draws water from his eyes. She is dazzled by the sun, just as she was the year before and the year before that. Can Ruby remember?

No. She’ll never remember. Only he can. 

By Lydia Pearson

Gently smoothing down

my locks of golden hair, 

I stare at the ghost girl

who lives in the window–

until someone

catches

 my eye.

He's gazing upon his own reflection, 

caught up inside a private world

I cannot yet see. 

But then, 

he notices me, 

noticing him. 

Our eyes meet

through the glass, 

for several silent, 

electric 

moments. 

Though, soon enough, 

our gazes guiltily shift

away, 

my heart remembers. 

Stores it in a box

of treasures. 

Building a litany 

of memories. 

Precious, private, beautiful.

Almost sacred, 

and burned 

into my brain 

like a photograph. 

Not to be forgotten or lost

in the sands of time 

at any point soon.

By Lydia Pearson

The Signal

My body feels like a live wire

just waiting

for the signal

to get going.

Feel that electricity 

Coursing through my veins

Every time your hand is close 

to mine. 

I see the way your legs and feet move

like your hands and arms do

when I'm near. 

When you fidgeted 

with the phone charger 

that lay next to my hand.

Did you want

to reach out?

Did you want 

me?

Do you think about the night 

you moved your palm 

to mine? 

The night I saw you

for the first time?

Do you think about the night 

you touched my hand 

to reassure me

that you wanted to spend time 

with me? 

The same night you stubbed out

your cigarette, 

the one you'd been begging for, 

so that we could talk. 

You reach for me, then

pull back-

like your hand 

has been burnt.

I've been burnt

before 

too. 

But that doesn't mean

we should ignore 

these sparks 

flying 

between us. 

Besides, maybe 

I can be the water 

to wash away 

the pain, 

the fears, 

the tears. 

Or the stable ground

to give you a solid place

to land 

should you find yourself

falling. 

And not the raging fire 

that burnt your skin

when you got too close, 

or the toxic air 

that fuelled it. 

What would you say to that? 

Would you let someone 

in, 

who doesn't push you 

towards the door, 

just keeps it as

open 

as a palm.

I will stick around

for now, 

as a light 

in the dark. 

If you want me, 

you'll know 

exactly 

where 

to go. 

Just make sure to hold 

my heart safe, too, 

with the same tender care.

If you can, then I think 

we'd be

alright. 

Meanwhile, I'll wait

for the signal

before making my way

to the boy whose voice

makes me feel like 

I'm coming home. 

By Nadia Adora Olusola Ayeni

Nadia Adora Olusola Ayeni is a creative poet based in Madison, Wisconsin. Her work is largely inspired by Celtic folk traditions and mythology. She began publishing her work during her senior year of high school and has received two honorable mentions from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her pieces "Ariel" and "Me Sister's Gane Awa'." She is currently studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology.

"This piece is written from the perspective of Walter Langton (Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and the King's Treasurer) and inspired by a true letter written following the Battle of Falkirk."

Good men I pray that you attend

And heed what I do say

I bring you news of battle won

An English victory 

We maintain our sacred freedom

By the sword and shield and fray

And ne'er have we been forsaken 

For Providence doth bless our names

The Scottish host, a war began

With greedy, haughty eyes 

They sought good King Edward's crown

And Wallace led their ranks 

They abandoned truth and reason

They deny our rightful reign!

God damned them for their treason

We cast them down to their graves 

When King Edward was in Scottish land 

Six leagues from Edinburgh 

There came news from a messenger 

Of rebel plans for war

The Scots with William Wallace 

Thought to challenge our good King

But he'd face them on the morrow 

Cowardice against Chivalry 

On the twenty-second of July

Our soldiers made their way

King Edward led his good army 

Through Scotland's lowly plains

Our men soon arrived at Falkirk

And the standards they did raise

They stood brave and true and ready

For by God, they'd win the day

Our longbowmen weakened their ranks

They were twelve thousand strong

The Scottish schiltrons couldn't stand

And reeled within the throng

Our good knights upon their horses 

Struck down the Scottish foes

Laid them low upon their homeland

Dyed their fields with their own blood

Good men I thank you for your time

Your loyalty has shown

You stand for King Edward's crown 

In honor, faith, and word

Whene'er evil rise against you

Know of whom you bear the names

Turn to God for His guidance 

Bless Saint Peter and Saint James

(Written: March 5 - March 18, 2026)