#Title

POETRY
PHOTO: COLLECTED

PTSD
NOORA SHAMSI BAHAR
Like puppets that dance to the tune of the puppet master
Bodily integrity we had to barter
For a pawn’s role in groupement
Dictated was our every movement
Down to our index trigger finger
Zombie-esque mindlessness
Anesthetized consciousness
Marching on, committing sins
Break-ins, bombings, burnings, slayings
Etched onto memories that retain the rawness
Some made it back
Seemingly in one piece, but with many a crack
On the inside, that cannot be discerned
Recurring nightmares of haunting experiences not penned
Self-annihilation the only thought that stuck
Martyrs and-slash-or heroes they call us
Is it worth all the fuss?
While they celebrate
We ache to recuperate
Our stories history shall never discuss
Noora Shamsi Bahar is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University, and a published researcher and translator.

I am found in fields
RAIAN ABEDIN
In the morning
where you will stand under shoddily set-up clouds
and imperfect people getting shuteye
instead of working, you will visit the lake
they cover now in sand. The world belongs to them
and you play second fiddle, you always play
the secondary roles and the role of the passing seconds.
Holes fill the street as they will fill the night
and the stomachs of the empty-eyed children of the roads
that lead to dead ends and concrete patriarchs
and plastic bags with glue flipping off the sleeping tricycles
and the broken wheels that represent us all.
I am a god when I am asleep, I am found to be inside the shimmer
of water as it fights against the brilliance of the screams that emanate
from the sky. I am found in fields where things stop growing
and I am found in prettier ideas than what exists between the spaces
of concrete and word and brick and mud. Ever moving, like the fleeting
resilience of the morning; and yet this is where so much of my heart
feels the ache to stop moving, this is the motion, this is the end;
Raian Abedin is currently working toward making his name as a poet.