Down to a Tea

Tristan Marajh, Issue 07
Previously published in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine

To my exes and estranged,
yet to budge from a grudge—
to those who are absent 
to those who resent,
to those who are distant with distaste:

I would like to invite you to tea
forty years from now
when we are old,
wrinkled and wringed out by the world
by those things that separated us—
money, lust, power,
status, ambition, trauma.

Let us sit down to tea
and put it all behind us
because forty years later,
it is all behind us.
Simply:
sit, sip, start again
from when our moments were simple and sweet,
like the people we chose to become.

~

Author’s Note:

Down to a Tea, when initially conceptualized, was expected to be a nonfiction piece, with earnest explorations of things humans compulsively chase throughout their lifetimes, unconsciously destroying relationships in the process. My aim for the piece was for the sweet, ultimate reconciliation of all individuals involved.

As I wouldn’t have chosen to closely fraternize with anyone who prioritized the vices mentioned in Down to a Tea, the poem isn’t about me. But it is about many other people and many other broken relationships. And usually, in the midst of those relationships, there were humble yet transcendent moments where the persons involved simply enjoyed each other; they laughed, shared and were nourished by the other’s compassion and empathy through pleasant company and conversations. The ending of Down to a Tea aims to recapture those moments, in purer aura: that of sweet, humble, cleansed old(er) age; an interaction almost holy, perhaps in the light of a loving sun.

Tristan Marajh is currently at work on two collections of short fiction.

when asked why I don't volunteer

Matthew E. Henry, Issue 07

because every professional development 
has become an exercise in emotional sharecropping—
unpaid labor, shackled in the red-faced sun
of small groups, whipped to explain everything 
they’ll forget when cut off in traffic, confined 
in an elevator, or too close on a sidewalk. 
or worse: auction-blocked, forced to open my mouth, 
show my teeth for all the assembled 
after speaking simple, uncomfortable truths 
in a breakout session full of buzzwords 
like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “antiracism.” 
because “diversity” means “we’ve allowed you 
to sit at our table, break our bread, become one of us—

almost,” and I’d rather pick cotton than explain, 
once again, that power is the number of times 
you can tell your story 
uninterrupted, 
only to be ignored for the next few semesters, 
centuries, or until another noose is found
in the bathroom stalls.

Celestial Bodies

Papermelon, Issue 07

Artist’s Statement:
"In these times of very uncertain feelings, the most important thing to me was to create a bridge between me. There were times of not understanding the frustrations or the why things are like this, but, in this life journey, after meeting my own body as a distant planet I was ready to discover whatever I should. This is my body and my own discoveries. And I think I'm very proud of them. - funny enough I can only remember a quote I read somewhere: ‘I'm thankful for my body, for being my home, protecting me and where I live on’, and as so it says, let us be keeping curious, brave, and gentle with ourselves as much as we are with others."

Taste Collector

Amlanjyoti Goswami, Issue 06

Eat a little more, she says, it will tide over those rough days later.
Grandmother, long gone, in the village house at the harvest.
I’ve been collecting tastes all summer.
They stay in the tongue of memory.
What came first – khar, the alkali or the steamed rice?
Was it a copper or brass plate?
The aroma of my first biryani, white rice swirling from the pot.
My first burger, juicy and forbidden, at seventeen
In the big city. The first dimsums were fried not steamed.
The lush curry – my father’s tenga – sour with lemon and tomatoes
And some cumin. This is a poem not a recipe.
That akhaa jeera chach pulao. Meat filled. Untranslatable.
Grandmom’s dark gravy, smoke blown, pigeon.
Scientists will one day recover a place for all tastes in the tongue
Where is sour, where sweet, what is umami, where resides the spice
Route to the brain, to the cells where they preserve
Memories like pickles.
I will call everyone home for the perfect meal, a buffet of possibilities.
Like memory, hope and the granary, the options and servings
Will be unlimited. Baked with love. Made with attention,
That hidden ingredient lingering in my tongue
I cannot find a name for,
As I turn page after page after page
In that dictionary of memory. Call it what you like. It stays.
The one that will tide us through all the rough days.

Conversations with the Dragon and the Goblin in my Head

Avra Margariti, Issue 06

The dragon said, I know all about 
accumulated treasure: my silver and gold, 
my sapphire and emerald 
kept close to my sunless arrow-riddled body. 
But why do you hide a box of old grape-sour corks 
in the cavern of your desk drawer? 

And I said to the dragon, They’re the corks of the wine bottles
my father emptied in his belly at nine p.m. on Saturdays
just before he drove me to my piano lesson 
their bodies dyed ruby like the dull passage of time 
or the sharp edges of memory. 

And then the goblin, gutter junk clutched 
in its gleeful magpie grip, plastic six pack rings
a chokehold around its throat, said, 
Why do you keep a strand of your mother’s hair before the chemo
with a lock of her old synthetic wig 
(the one they almost buried with her but then they didn’t)? 

And I said to the goblin, 
Indeed, why do we hoard the things that hurt us, 
why is our grief so stained, yet so shiny still?

The Heartwood and Not the Bark

Lynne Sargent, Issue 06

Tell me of your layers,
the way you grow.

I know some years might be
too fresh
too thirsty 
too tender

the heartwood and not the bark.

Who says that we must always
be peeling back layers

that the smooth 
is better than the rough?

that each year is only a year
when some are eternities
and others are paper thin
over in a blink

and it is not all to do with seasons, climate change?

Love,
know that when you put
that ring upon me
it will not be the first one
that you have bound me with.

you are already at my core

the rest is width, and deep roots, and remembering.

Gathering Stardust

by Caitlin Larson, Issue 06

Ouroboros

Gretchen Rockwell, Issue 05

The first time I saw the sharp silhouettes

I couldn’t fumble fast enough to capture

a photograph: Indian flying foxes, bats remembered 

from a Weird n’ Wild Creatures card collected

at ten, when I thought I wanted to be a biologist 

before I realized I'd have to do science. Then I traded

that flying fox card for a Cerberus one, caring more 

about the spiderweb of wonder between literary 

and literal. These days I prefer nature in its un-

nerving wonders. Who needs Athena splitting Zeus' skull 

when mind-controlling jewel wasps exist, spiking into 

lesser insects and hijacking them as a host for their spawn

which eat the corpse inside out and emerge fully formed? 

I still have a favorite fantastical creature: the phoenix, whose nature

is self-immolation. In reality, the mechanism is rarely so static as fire, 

instead often a living instrument, nature curling in on itself 

in an endless wheel. The shadow of death takes the shape of wings

or fangs or the leafy fronds of a fern, unfurling. The lesson is: 

nature will kill you eventually, from the inside out 

or as another of its incarnations. Still, I prefer its marvels 

over myth—how certain seeds can only bloom after being 

burned, flowers exhaling open after forest fires, ash  

still hanging thick in the air while something 

new pokes through: life wriggling out through the cracks.

we will not burn any longer

Marigrace Angelo, Issue 04

they called you a witch, once,
hung you in the town square
for having an opinion.

they claimed you sank ships,
spread famine,
conspired to kill kings.

they crushed your fingers,
cut your hair, deprived you of sleep
searched your body for blemishes

until you told them
what they wanted to hear
to get them to stop touching you.

you, who have learned to heal their sick
and deliver their babies,
to care for their animals, and cook their food,

were left to sink
at the bottom of the river,
dresses full of stones.

and in the rush of the current
sometimes we can hear you whisper:
a warning, a curse, a wish, a prayer

three hundred years later,
they are still hunting
and we are still running.

still surviving, still resisting,
persisting in spite of those
who call us witches.

Only Treading

Hal Y. Zhang, Issue 05

Here amidst the Pacific
I have forgotten dryness.
The Saharan memory chants
no longer work—
yellow an abstract color, what some
once called my skin but
my webbed hands
breaking and rebreaking the skin of water
are not any color but
water. Dry perhaps is
the sensation of tickling, a bug burrowed
within, that deep in the throat
I knew but has left me.
Shriveled needles, concentrating sun
power into singular points, how
does a cactus live with being
unwanted
among the ferns, how
we float
just to live now, the water
is not life but illusion
thereof. They say you will
see things but I
never have, only sky
and sky
and sky
the largest hole
I can’t fall into.
The one constant still
mutable, blue to black
to bleeding dawn, not like
the sea a faceless mirror. Look down:
there is only yourself,
broken,
phantom arcs that don’t define you
stories you don’t believe
splayed against your palm.
It will take lifetimes to read
moving parts
to memories
to through,
but all you
have is
time.

Understanding Dorothy

E. Jade Lomax, Issue 05

I drove through the sunrise this morning.
It’s funny, how we don’t notice things like that.
You’re breathing. Your fingers are aching cold.
Then you look up, and the whole sky is
shot through with strands of light.
The world is in color again.
It always was.
Keep driving. Your fingers are freezing
but your chest is tight under two jackets
and a scarf your best friend crocheted for you.
The sunrise will come. Grip
the steering wheel. Watch
for merging traffic. Breathe.
On dark nights, carry a flashlight
and learn to tell green leaves from brown ones by touch.
I promise,

the world is in color.

Personal Space

Lucia Ceta, Issue 04

From Lucia Ceta on this piece:

The call out for contributions to the upcoming issue asked us to reflect about space, and it got me thinking about how much I appreciate my personal space. I consider my personal space the space in which I feel safe and protected enough to create. That space has physical and immaterial manifestations: the mental place that I have to be in in order to create and the physical space in which I am creating. As artists both these spaces are so important, and often one is useless without the other. My illustration is meant to portray a familiar space (physically and mentally) of safety and comfort where essential needs are met and conditions are just right for creating.