Basel, Switzerland
I wake up. The cherry blossom of the neighbouring house has burst into bloom. Bees in my garden, the last of the winter snow glimpsed at a distant mountain, the clear sounds of glacier water running in my dreams. When I was nine, I asked for a cassette player for Christmas. My parents were bemused, but I have it still, in my quarantine room. Half an hour before I sleep every night, I play a cassette of Baul music. It is the music of a time so deep and far in my memory I have to travel downstream across years to reach it. It is the music of old lullabies and words falling through my throat half-remembered, my lips forgetting how to shape them. [before falling asleep] Baul music helps me keep time — but also lose time in the drifts of waves lapping against the music-boat. I think of the boatmen rowing through endless phases of the moon. [after lunch] The insistent drone of a phone ring. Cut. Ring. Cut. I reach out across the gulf in my dream, echoing Tsvetaeva, my skin nearly trembling to meet warmth — and then a flood. I watch Ghibli movies — particularly Kiki. It makes me smile, but also the slow melancholy dreaminess of the movie feels too close. Kiki lying in the grass, Kiki and Jiji listening to the radio, the way time slows down every time I watch the movie — or now, everyday-- Will I see you again? More spirit visitations in my dreams. I start: dear so-and-so, the tulips are glowing with light and I fear their petals are thinner than tissues; dear so-and-so, I met you in a train station and we sat on a bench (we would not dare to be there now); dear so-and-so, the bleeding hearts in my garden have bloomed again and the last time I remember that happening was ten years ago — yes, ten years, and I feel drawn to that plant, its impossibility; dear so-and-so, I am hungry — I am always hungry… dear so-and-so, I want to touch your hands again. It is spring. Pratyusha is an Indo-Swiss writer. Her pamphlet, Bulbul Calling, is forthcoming with Bitter Melon. Her debut pamphlet Night Waters was published by Zarf Editions in 2018; she co-edits the eco/world poetry zine, amberflora.
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Delhi, India
The house down the road The house nearby Is earth sky. The horizon where Lines meet. What we see with eye Hidden from plain sight. It is destiny and recovery. Time turning. Life and death. Death and life. Spring and summer. Where sun and moon meet For a brief chat on time. Flying in sheer blue For a particle of an instant. Night knocks The day is not alone The flower's first breath Not evening yet. Windows open, doors close A book more precious than gold. This promise to love and live Cannot be touched, only felt. The doctor's phone call interrupts The beginning of a new dawn. Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poetry has been published around the world, in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, the UK, Canada, USA, South Africa, Kenya and Germany. His recent collection of poems, River Wedding, has just been published by Poetrywala. He grew up in Guwahati, Assam and lives in Delhi. New York, USA Melissa Ho lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Wildness, Softblow, decomP, and elsewhere.
Sydney, Australia
Oily Forehead Sweet blood, you leave shy whispers on my shoulder. My Discwoman shirt is fun-sized and beginning to look pained on myself. Red nightmares binge on my forehead and curl around my sunken cheeks leaving a new kind of lethargy to brace the tiller. Mingy bits of blood embrace the dry calluses on my knuckles. AHAHAHAHA! Ever got the feeling you’ve been cheated?’. Too distract, I dream of scribbly notes I’d send my other self, Moira. It’s just medication for when I was younger, but it’s been a whilst since I’ve sent any love letters. ‘Our dragon skulls, we are fire breathers. Broken and rebuilt, time and time again. It’s just a hurtful situation amidst a self-cannibalizing society. It’s cruel I know but Moira and I will survive it. We have too. She inspires me to breathe and I can feel her rising in my lungs. The world is a dirty rag that’s begun to mold over time and we are the specks of dirt infecting it. No one is clean anymore. No one is innocent.’ I saw the hallowed edge of the earth, the decrepit Tower of Babel. Good night. Lakshmi Krishnan is looking for love. She is writing a book for the past called ‘Sacrosanct: The Delusion Between Pain and Pleasure’. It will be released posthumously. In the interim, she’ll say it’s okay if she’s not Nepali, Chinese or Australian enough but she’s probably lying. It be like that sometimes. Brooklyn, USA
· one of K’s milk buns, toasted, butter. black tea, oatmilk. half a banana. · bowl: yesterday’s rice, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, scrambled eggs, peanut sauce, green onion, cilantro · handful spicy peanuts, kombucha · dinner by K: pork steak w/ mustard sauce, potatoes, crispy kale · some Haribo sour cubes –– I have been experiencing more coincidences—so slight and swift, like vinyl hiss, like the playback of time is skipping. Is this happening to you? Keywords ping between books I’m reading (distracted minutes at a time); talks with my roommate (when we need to say more than our devolved gestural language can convey); hunger pangs for the world of one month ago and counting; Twitter; the oatmilk carton; a stray lyric. Déjà vu indicates a glitch in the Matrix. Some neuroscience has it that the “remembered” occurrence (which in the moment becomes recurrence) is fabricated at the moment of perceiving what in fact you are encountering totally anew. But why does the memory crystallize where it does—with this person, when I was a teenager, on the north side of the lake, in a dream I’d forgotten? In the circuit of quarantine, in the unchanging rooms of this apartment, it’s an animal, even vegetable, existence. Hours run together on a wheel of waking and sleeping and eating. Time sloshes back on itself, all points drawn together and hyperlinked. Coincidences quiver through the substance, the pumping action of circulation in a body not quite at rest but in a state of vague waiting. jean yoon is a writer, performer, and translator interested in dream logic, inarticulacy, models of memory, and masks. they miss the library, karaoke, and dancing with other people. written from a runway at Heathrow Airport Grace Lee is a writer and postgraduate student who divides her time between Cambridge, Seoul, and Auckland.
Macau
(Day 9 in government quarantine in Macau) Most afternoons, I sit as close to the window as I can and bathe in the sun. If I close my eyes, there is the illusion of being directly under it, outside. The boundaries are dissolving. In Parasite, sunlight penetrates onto the couple from the basement, dancing. My long nails a testament to the days passing. Have you been having vivid dreams? The nightstand clock skips ahead. I ask the government for a nail clipper. It’s too dangerous, they say. The Chinese are terrified of dying, my mother says. On the phone, J mentions skin hunger. I tell her my dreams are always about touch. That’s not true. I always wake up right before we touch. My dreams are about hunger. Boundaries dissolve. In the morning, I shut my eyes to try and go beyond that hunger. JinJin Xu is a writer and filmmaker from Shanghai. She is currently an MFA candidate and adjunct professor in Poetry at NYU. Inspired by FangFang’s Wuhan diaries, she has been keeping Pandemic Diaries here: https://tinyletter.com/jinjinx Los Angeles, USA
How Do We Count Our Dead? By country By date By state By city By month By county By neighborhood By age, gender, race. By breaths lost loved ones left behind accomplishments in life shades of acquired fame? Do we grieve the first one lost in China differently than the ones left behind in Spain or the Americans lost in New Orleans? Do we count them if they were never tested but died of respiratory failure? Do we know who shows up on bar graphs and pie charts on line graphs where the Y-axis is altered to imply a flattening to muffle the sounding of an alarm that tells us were too late? Do we stop counting and seek hope as we carry on in our cancelled lives? Noriko Nakada writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Australia
Waking up I find myself with free time on my hands. It’s a strange new sensation that I am still adapting to. I go through the essentials of the morning; bath, breakfast and work. Only an hour or two has passed. Next, I read a book but that too becomes tedious after a while. Boredom is slowly creeping up on me and I rush to get away from it. My desperate dash takes me to the garden, a place so unfamiliar to me that it might as well have been nothing more than a myth. My grandparents are there collecting all the ripe fruit and planting new ones. I glance back to the safety of the house. For a second, I debate going back but a small glimpse of the boredom creeping up on me is all it takes for me to make up my mind. I pull on some gloves and start to work. Lunch is called and I’m surprised by how fast time went by. Packing up my tools, I head in. Today’s food is good. Potato bake with lots of cheese. I continue to do odd jobs around the house and as I look around I can’t even find a glimpse of boredom. At the end of the day, my family sits around the Carom board as we narrate how our day was. I find myself worn out yet happy as I talk about all the fun I had. Jhanvi is an Australian student originally from India. Melbourne, Australia Esha Serai is sixteen and living in Melbourne, Australia. She has been writing poetry since she was thirteen, as a way of reflecting on her place in the world.
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STAY HOME DIARYan online archive of diary entries by Asian artists and writers, recording our lives from March to April 2020. |