January 2025 | poetry
On the bank of the Seine
in the heath and heart
of the sun’s playground—
that’s where we lay.
Our heads rest on a cushion of plight
as we sink further into the fields
of lush river violets, violets
smooching our petaled cheeks—
blanketing our freckles from the frigid
blistering air, softening
our cracked lips. We smear
violet husks across our faces
until they crumple, shriveling
from an absence of light
in these mallows of mid September
gloom, their ominous purple filling
the smiles across our faces before
their sweet sugar plum scent could
even frolick into our pores. We are
lifeless—but we weren’t always. For years
we smelled of the sun’s honeyed lemons
and orange meringue pie, raindrops
and gifts of gold. Our eyes shimmered
in the leathery moon’s shadows—
a crisp December glistening on the horizon.
At the peak of our ecstacy, we giggled
until cancer’s rind of tree bark
wrapped its treacherous ridges around
our lungs, punted splinters down our throats
to quench our laughter. Somehow
the wavering constellations illuminate
the ball point grasses’ narrow, finite hallways
before they retract into the night sky’s
lustrous black hole, the one trapping
each dusty auburn wish in an endless tunnel—
for more years of violet picking.
for more lemon scented sundays spent
basking in the sun’s generous warmth.
for more time—because the light was never ours.
Kaviya Dhir
Kaviya Dhir is a student poet based in Texas. As a junior in high school, she has been recognized by Georgetown University and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for her work. She was recently named a finalist for the 2024-2025 Houston Youth Poet Laureate designation.
January 2025 | nonfiction
- I was born almost dead, the cord wrapped around my throat.
- A doctor(ate) actually said the words to me: “You carry Death close.”
- Death has stood by my side, time and again, and said, “It’s not her time yet.” I’ve accepted it.
- Damaged lungs from 9/11.
- Volunteering in Iraqi Kurdistan, mere hours from Mosul. The multitude of checkpoints along the Syrian border with masked men with guns far too large, held far too lazily in one-handed grips, leaning against their shoulders, as they confiscated my passport and tried to pull me to the small, windowless building that was somehow present at every one.
- A village decimated by ISIS, and in a small city where I was the lone American naively going on early morning runs and exploring the destroyed buildings, painting over the swastikas I found with paint “borrowed” from nearby construction sites, and still Death said: “Not yet.”
- The village elders of Duhola asked me to help spread the word of their people, of the Yazidi forgotten entirely by the international community. I promised I would. I still try. But I am just one, small person.
- So, Death, what is it exactly about me that you think I have yet to do? Is there a chance, however small, that you think I might make some sort of difference in this world? What is it that’s going to happen before you gently greet me, take my hand, and tell me I can rest?
Maia Brown-Jackson
After the incredibly practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, pushcart-nominated Maia Brown-Jackson braved the myriad esoteric jobs that follow, until straying to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes.
January 2025 | nonfiction
In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.
I live in Vermont, surrounded by giant sugar maples and white birch. I kayak nearby with a Blue Heron family and five turtles. My peonies are blooming. It’s cold today when three days earlier it was high in the nineties. I’m wearing a sweater, which I also bought overseas.
My mother always wore espadrilles all summer long. I have her last pair, long past wearing but certainly better made than the two pairs I bought overseas. Just because you’re in a sexy foreign country doesn’t mean the merchandise is sexy even if the guy selling it is. Once, in San Francisco, my sexy boyfriend bought me a gardenia to wear behind my ear. I wore it everyday until it turned brown. When I got home, on my doorstep was a large oval vase with six gardenias floating on top. That boy I lost my virginity to in high school and we’re still friends, unlike the two espadrille boyfriends.
Besides peonies, I also swoon over orange blossoms. I’ve a tall branch of mock orange that comes a close second to the orange blossom grove I rode through on horseback, also overseas, with another boyfriend. It was summer then, in a desert, which enhanced the scent to swooning even more (if you were riding the other horse you would know what I mean). I keep searching for an orange blossom perfume that smells like that evening but they’re all imitations smelling acrid and cheap. The boyfriend was never cheap. He bought me a first edition of my favorite author, Jean Giono, with a woodblock print on the cover of a man shooting a boar with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning hill is ablaze in orange flames with little figures running around, their arms in the air, mouths wide, screaming. But the book doesn’t feel like that to me, more like velvet and peonies.
There’s no way around the past unless you think you’ve owned it which is like saying you have a contract signed with blood and drawn up by the State. My past with these guys is most certainly drawn with blood, thinned out crimson in the regions of my brain. I enjoyed each and every one even if they didn’t work out in the end. There’s no end to blood, or men, or memories, or the past. An ever flowing, changing bloodstream. Impossible to tourniquet, no matter how many sutures.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for the Observer, ArtNet, and other art publications. www.dianparker.com
