Poetry

Visiting Hours

Visiting Hours

By Jessica Faleiro

During a routine consultation, the cardiac interventionist frowns at my father’s ECG reading. He’s immediately admitted into the ICU, where he’s restricted to seeing visitors for only thirty minutes, twice a day. The ICU security guard, Raj, allows me into the ward after visiting hours, when he realises that my father is in for a long haul. It occurs to me that he’s seen as many dead people wheeled out as live ones wheeled in.

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By Sara Leana Ahmad

Issue no 22

I remember this one evening when I was six watching the news with my family from our suburban home in the San Fernando Valley. During those days my mom was always crying. One of the first times I ever saw her cry was in those first days of the invasion, crouched under the dinner table, too ashamed to face us, wailing like I’d never seen since.

Inventory

Inventory

By Jessica Faleiro

Issue no 22

We are on summer break in Goa when my father first hears. “I was just there,” he tells everyone. “It won’t last.” We hear the stories of Kuwaitis being tortured and Indians being airlifted. I’m quickly enrolled in the local school, expected to befriend the other tenth graders. My mother brings a kitten to the place we’ve been calling home, to distract us.

Sowing Aunties

Sowing Aunties

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Issue no 20
An APWT publication
Winning Entry

He laughed at me and my family for saving and reusing—tofu containers, green onion rubber bands, plastic bags, twist ties, takeout containers, glass jars, cookie tins—and he took it upon himself to secretly throw away all that we had carefully saved and washed and stored away. He thought it made us small and poor to reuse. He was big and rich enough to go out to the store to buy things new.