It was the 90s and I was in my 20s walking down Broadway on my way home when a man grabbed my boob and grinned as he passed by.
I was an unlikely candidate for groping with my A cup chest.
A woman watched the whole thing go down and asked, “Do you know him?”
I said, “No!”
Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Walking A&P and Black Elephants and three poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize.
sonnets of Michelangelo, those composed whilst on a limited folic acid intake, are so twisted in upon themselves they have become both water-resistant & washable. Even so, that insane artistry, the multiple narrative perspectives, the forward- thinking use of glass— all still tempt like fresh raspberries at the local store.
flirty singles, power players, & celebrities
It’s evident from the way that the angles of the owner’s jawbones
project that this laundromat is a reincarnation of the original late
night dance-spot where mansion chic & rock-star bach- elor pad collided.
adagio
Words come back to me — pizzicato, arco, bass clef — from that part of my past which has to do with music. Finger positions come back, the horsehair bow, & that upright
stance you have to adopt & adapt to with an instrument as big as yourself. Associat- ions come back, & favourite pieces — currently it’s the Concierto de Aranjuez that’s
picking its way across my forebrain. You might say everything comes back; but as long as time continues its inexorable march forward you know that will never be true.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. His most recent books are with the slow-paced turtle replaced by a fast fish, published by Sandy Press in May, 2023, & a free downloadable chapbook of visuals & poems, Mercator Projected, published by Half Day Moon Press in August 2023.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Another life story at the AA meeting. He began with the gullible stepfather, the mother’s fantasies, then
we heard about his unseen real father’s dominance, his adolescent interest in the spiritual life, his scorn for hire
purchase, his qualities of leadership. He loved to play tricks, hated violence, and although women adored him, men, too,
from all walks of life, he seemed celibate. He saw it coming, predicted it, when his own people betrayed him, crucified
him really. He would cry out for a drink, felt desperate when he thought he had been abandoned. One of his best mates denied
knowing him, and after he woke in a cave, alone, bleeding, left for dead, that was when he knew his life had hit rock bottom.
Commentators’ Team
Defence: I know that’s a cliché/ It’s a known fact/ It’s an arm wrestle/ Scoreboard pressure/ They’re under the pump/ Time’s ticking away.
Midfield: He needs to stand up and be counted/ A living legend/ On a learning curve/ A season-defining game/ Statistically speaking/ Where angels fear to tread.
Attack: Absolutely sensational/ He’s on fire/ Last roll of the dice/ No pain, no gain/ Through the eye of a needle/ Winners are grinners.
Interchange: Horribly wrong/ It’s a tragedy/ At the end of the day/ The bottom line.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Southword, Stand, & The Stony Thursday Book. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.
– Ah, but what about that big rock that just moved?
– Whoa!
As soon as the colour-crazed Toonal TV logo and its accompanying laugh-track jingle both erupt in sync, and the Sock Puppet Squad whoosh on-screen with their googly button eyes and wide sticker grins, Joe Easton wakes up much faster.
“Quick, Mum – you’ll miss it!” he shouts through the lounge doorway, holding half a bowl of cereal under his already milk-damp chin.
10 minutes later…
It’s almost the break when she appears, still wearing her threadbare dressing gown. She doesn’t carry any cereal or toast. Not even a manky old banana from their fridge’s blue-tinted plastic drawers.
“Sorry,” she says, sitting beside Joe and making the tired sofa sag even more. “I dozed off again for a bit there. Right, what’s been happening?”
He shrugs.
She leans forward, peering across at him. “Ignoring me, are we?”
“No.”
“So, spill then.”
“Fine.” He twists round towards her, his own seat groaning. “They keep rapping about kindness and how being kind’s most important when times are hard. It’s easy for them to say, though – they’re socks!”
“You don’t think being kind’s important?”
“Yeah, but not every single morning.”
“Hmm.”
Joe lowers his bowl.
“Oi.” Mum points at the glass tabletop. “You’ll leave a ring if you’re not careful.”
Except Joe’s not really listening anymore. Ads hopscotch on the telly, jumping across the screen one after another, each eager to show off.
Several slots in, that promo from yesterday repeats, all jungle backdrop and CGI vines, with some cartoon creatures lurking about too; not as realistic as they could be, but they’ll do. Letters golder than buried treasure reveal clear instructions while wild animal noises play on loop:
HEY, KIDS!
WE KNOW YOU KNOW WHO RAINFROSTEDS’ NEXT MASCOT SHOULD BE… WE JUST NEED YOU TO TELL US.
PLEASE SEND YOUR DRAWINGS AND TOP 5 REASONS WHY TO:
Contact details, deadlines, etc.
Soon followed by:
OPEN TO CHILDREN AGES 6-11 (WITH PARENTAL/GUARDIAN CONSENT)
£1,000 PRIZE UP FOR GRABS!!
Joe presses pause on the remote, waiting for his mum to notice.
“Is this real?” she asks after a few moments.
“Seems it,” he says.
“OK, OK.” Now she’s nodding loads, reminding him of the bulldog bobblehead inside her car. “OK, we’ll start brainstorming today after school.”
Joe scoffs.
“And what’s that supposed to mean, young man?”
“No offence, Mum, but you barely ever eat breakfast.”
She mumbles something about “not always my choice”, which Joe can’t quite hear.
*
– Looks sort of like your mum in the morning.
– I’m telling.
– Don’t you dare!
Their kitchen table is round, biscuit-coloured with brown flecks all through it; a large inedible cookie. Joe found this out when he was really small, and his teeth still hurt at the memory.
He sits there now, not tempted in the least, crushing A4 sheet after A4 sheet into compact snowballs, before letting them fly behind him – where the recycling crate lives. Whether against wall, floor or hard plastic, each crumpled projectile thuds weakly.
“Maybe we should have a breather.”
Mum rises from her squealing chair opposite.
“I’ve almost got it,“ Joe insists.
“Fair enough, but I need water. Do you want some?”
“No, thank you.”
“Suit yourself.”
She walks to the sink. It’s almost lunchtime and she’s still wearing her Do Not Disturb Before 10AM pyjamas. Outside, sunlight eggs the dirt-smeared windows while giant weeds grow taller between slate tiles.
Joe rubs ink-stained fingers across his closed eyelids.
“Why don’t we ever go to the zoo?” he asks, yawning. “Dad used to take me.”
Mum slurps, replying, “Because it’s too far and I’m not comfortable driving long distances.”
“We could ride the bus.”
“Why are you so fixated on the zoo all of a sudden?”
“Because I need a cool animal for this, and the zoo’s full of them.”
“So’s the internet.”
“It’s not the same.”
“It is cheaper, though. Go on, get searching.”
She hands Joe her phone while he’s still groaning; however, he soon relents, unlocking it and typing ‘weird wildlife’ into the top bar.
Results flood the screen like a pixelated Noah’s Ark.
Several taps later, he grins and reaches for his pencil again, plus some fresh, unballed paper.
Mum sits back down. “Find anything good?”
“Maybe,“ he says, doodling fast.
*
– Do you think he enjoys pretending to be still all the time?
– I would; it looks peaceful.
Its limp, grey nose reminds Joe’s mum of those old windsocks they have around airfields. She starts giggling.
“Why are you laughing?” he asks her.
“I’m not, just appreciating.”
Joe flips the page. “I wrote my reasons why he should win, see?”
Mum squints as she reads each scribbled bullet point aloud:
“1) He’s cute.”
“People love watching cute things on TV. It makes them softer.”
“OK, if you say so. 2) You probably haven’t heard of him.”
“Me and Dad didn’t until we saw one.”
“Hmm. 3) He really does live in the rainforest.” Mum nods. “Nice and topical. Or should that be tropical?”
Joe rolls his eyes.
“Tough table. 4) He could make people smile.”
“Not enough smiles these days.”
“5) I want him as a pet, but he’s too big for our garden.” Mum chuckles. “Don’t even think about it, mister. Has he got a name?”
“Crap, I forgot to add it!”
“Language, Joseph.”
“Sorry.” Joe reflips the page, writing rapidly in the top left corner. “Will you send it for me?”
Mum tugs at the edge of her pyjama top. “Yes, on my lunch break on Monday.”
*
– What is he?
– Name: Toska. Species: Malayan Tapir. Age: 7 years – same as you, mate.
– He’s a long way from home.
Two weeks later and Joe keeps running home from school. Always the route sweats his heavy breath right out of him, but he still manages a feeble gasp of “Any post?” after letting the door slam shut each time.
Today’s no exception – standing there in the hallway, fists clenched at his sides and jumper clung around him, a superhero’s fallen cape.
He peeks into the kitchen, but his mum’s video-calling on her laptop (at least she’s dressed for this one, he thinks). She waves him off sideways towards the living room.
When he enters, his tomato cheeks ripen into a smile. He attacks the big cardboard box faster than he can see it; ribbons of brown paper float like the remnants of long-dead fireworks, before falling slowly to the crumb-fed carpet below.
Joe practically sticks his head inside, grabbing the creased note from on top. Swallowing hard, he unfolds it and reads:
Dear Joe Easton,
Thank you for submitting to Rainfrosteds’ Next Mascot competition.
We’re pleased to inform you that we loved your entry and will be making Toska the Tapir our new spokesanimal.
Tune in next Friday after SPS Adventures on Toonal TV (7.30am) to meet Toska on the telly.
And don’t forget your free Rainfrosteds to enjoy while you’re watching.
Congratulations again!
Yours sincerely,
The Rainfrosteds Team
Joe’s chest constricts a little and he sends more paper dregs spiralling. They must just have forgotten the money, he tells himself, as Mum appears and asks, “What’s the verdict?”
*
– Says here he was born in the zoo.
– So, he’s never even been to Malaysia?
– ‘Fraid not.
“Listen here, sunshine.”
Joe’s mum practically spits into the speaker of her mobile phone.
“No, I’m sorry, you guys screwed up. We did everything right. Now what are you” – she uses that last word for target practise – “gonna do about it?”
It’s been over two weeks of this; her slippers have left tracks in the living-room carpet, and her voice is deep as Dad’s used to be.
Joe says nothing, watching CGI undergrowth stir once more on the telly screen.
“No, I didn’t check social media… Because I haven’t logged onto any accounts since my husband died, that’s why. Grief’s one way to keep you out of the bloody Matrix, let me tell you.”
Blurred around the edges, Toonal TV’s latest cool-guy presenter appears as if emerging from digitised bushes. He wipes invisible sweat off his forehead and keeps panting too loud.
“Hey, guys.” An exaggerated Australian accent makes Joe cringe; tapirs aren’t even from Australia! “I’m just looking for my new mate. You seen him?”
“The point is my son worked hard, won fair and square, and now you selfish people won’t give him his prize money. So, what am I supposed to tell him? That it was all for nothing?”
Joe braces himself as the final insult waddles into shot.
Identical to the updated cereal box perched on the table in front of him, Rainfrosteds really did turn his beloved tapir purple for some reason – with tiny white spots dripping like paint-splatter down his back and lime-green tufts of hair quiffing out of his head and tail.
Joe shivers, getting major supervillain vibes.
OTT again, the presenter cries out “Oh, there you are, Tim! Where were you hiding?”
So that’s why Toska hadn’t appeared on the box. But it’s only two syllables! If Joe can remember reading it years ago, Dad by his side trying his best to keep up and stay awake, then everyone else could understand it too.
Kids aren’t stupid, he wants to scream at the screen.
“Another free cereal? Are you actually serious? Fine, we’ll just see you in court. Goodbye.”
Mum jabs the button, then slams her handset on the table so hard the case cracks even more.
Right now, they can’t bear to look at each other, not with Tim the Tapir’s smug little grin, the colour of long-expired milk, all around them, and the creature’s high-honking laughter curdling in their eardrums.
Robert Keal hails from Kent but currently lives in Solihull, where he works as a copywriter. His recent fiction can be found in 100 Word Story and The Ekphrastic Review. He loves walking the tightrope between strangeness and reality.
The night is an endless frustrating vast empty well into which I am continually falling but never reaching the bottom, never drawing closer to the malicious water.
At 2 am, I wake up, my body electric, my eyes watchful and alert and as far away from sleep as is possible.
I peek through the Venetian blinds that drape my window like eyes from a woebegone factory.
Yes, I peek through the blinds, and I see nothingness—the black and implacable and impenetrable and unforgiving night as thick and dark as a swamp.
I return to my bed, which lies alive with sheets wrinkled and puke green and sweaty, and I pound my pillow into smithereens and slam it against the headboard of my bed.
I try to read Kafka’s The Trial. Strange choice to seduce sleep, n’est-ce-pas? But the words on the filthy page are like worms that curl into opaqueness, and Kafka’s paragraphs elongate till they are as impenetrable as the swarthy night.
I blunder my way out of bed and stumble to the kitchen and pour myself a secret bowl of Cheerios and return to my bed and slurp the cereal and study the little O’s as if they held some sort of meaning,
And I hope and pray that the cereal will gird me for the long fight through the night to find rest and meaning in the nothingness of the dark.
The night is a boa constrictor wrapping itself around my soul and squeezing the life out of it.
I’ve had enough of Kafka’s prose, which is a dark impenetrable puzzling of malice and myth-making words of anomie and soullessness.
I turn off the silver metallic lamp by the bed and plunge into the blackest of the night so far.
The pillow feels like a memory that I no longer want to hang on to.
I toss and turn, feeling the sheets beneath me like iron, the pillow like the repository of lost hopes and dreams.
The night screams on, growing more tragic by the minute, by the second, like an evil and rambunctious dragon.
I levitate from the bed. The sheets burble with unforgiving sweat.
I toddle down the hallway to the bathroom and hang my dick like dirty laundry over the toilet bowl, which in the death of night resembles a huge gaping mouth yearning to swallow me whole.
Drip. Drip. Drip. The peeing finally comes to a denouement that is completely devoid of significance. Done. My body is thankfully empty of urine.
Back to the Shakespearean tragedy of the bed. 4 am. 4:30 am. 5 am. The minutes click by like sodden and lugubrious steps that one takes in some netherworld where sleep is not delineated, defined, or allowed.
Facing one way. Rolling over. Facing another way. My eyes as far from sleep as New York is from Capetown, as Pluto is from Earth.
Eyes alert, wired, steady, peering into the darkness and the future that lurks in that darkness,
And seeing nothingness. Peering. Staring. Unblinking. I lie strangling on the well-sweated sheets, the perspiring sheets,
And wait for a haunted sleep that promises never to come.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He has done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines.
You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.
blanket and sombrero dropped in a pile, she runs through a vacant city of gold, echoes thudding against eardrums, sweat pouring in a hum.
the priest rings a bell to the stirring dust, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, spits, walks back to the bottle and eats the worm.
she calls him father. he waves her in. their arms slow in the heat.
risky business
paintings locked in colour
and boulders in falling rock zones, never really falling.
you’ve never seen a pebble bounce or heard a hard crack and you know if you drive through this same threatening stretch of road every year and locate the same boulder on a precipitous ledge it will always be el cid dead on his horse which gives you something to talk about.
pigments are never diluted with water but seasons change your taste in fruits and vegetables and leave you nothing to choose at the market except endive and spinach. and the heavy green of one colour is a still life’s red tablecloth hung over the edge in perfect folds of shadowed smiles with teeth unseen
improving the drainage
walking along the street near my home where machines are putting in new sewers;
no humans to be seen here.
just yellow backhoes and orange cranes red dump trucks with windows layered in foggy brown and not a human within them, not a movement.
slabs of concrete and asphalt piled for a campfire, it seems;
smells captured under bulldozers and released as steam. a whole neighbourhood glued in chaos and coated in the sewage of wet dust.
walking past the detour signs and plastic blinking lights, generators thumping failing thumping.
home finally but not really there, crouched unsteadily on the sidedoor steps fingering spider webs, teasing apart the smells of bean soup and a flooded basement.
props
the old men who play chess in parks
rarely speaking, smoking tobacco spitting juice as young boys watch and run for sandwiches and coffee. as sun sprinkles through the trees just enough and the breeze folds a newspaper just enough.
i have never seen this.
the old men who wheeze and take pills, cough and lock in dentures before the sandwiches; piss themselves from the coffee. who wear safari hats and measure immortality with captured pawns.
i have never seen this.
except in movies grainy and frightening whose titles i forget.
soft landing
chocolate evening drips a candle of slow light. coffee, gurgling breath of steam aroma is harboured in dreams of unthinking skin. closed eyes and the exquisite deadness falls through murmurs of crossed and barricading arms. my hair is uncombed my breath is unwashed my heart is a trampoline (and not a pump) so warmth splashes randomly and grease flies from bacon but doesn’t burn;
a rare moment.
Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or, is forthcoming, in The Cardiff Review, The Cordite Review, Roi Faineant, North Dakota Quarterly, J Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere.
(Inspired by “What I Believe” by Jacqueline Woodson)
I believe teriyaki chicken with rice tastes better than anything. I believe my grandma agreed. I believe God whispered to her our family teriyaki sauce recipe. I believe my father taught the secret to me to continue her legacy.
I believe I will continue her legacy by clothing every meat I eat with sweet teriyaki.
I believe my wife dislikes sweet meat. I believe that does not matter to me. I believe that does not matter to her either.
I believe our future children might not like it either. I believe my wife and I will dress their meat with teriyaki sauce anyway. I believe my children will eat teriyaki chicken with rice anyway.
I believe, if they like it, they might even learn the recipe and then forget it after eating too much McDonald’s or Wendy’s.
I believe, despite this possibility, they will still carry my grandma and father’s legacy. I believe they will even honour my wife and me
because
I believe they will see, just like anybody, that family is fitted with so much more meaning than chicken and rice in sweet teriyaki.
Caleb Delos-Santos (he/him) is an English graduate student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Throughout his four years of writing, Caleb has published poetry with nearly twenty literary magazines, including North Dakota Quarterly and the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, and most recently released his first two poetry collections, A Poet’s Perspective (2022) and Once One Discovers Love (2023). Caleb also won the 2022 Esselstrom Writing Prize and the West Wind Literary Magazine’s 2023 Best in Genre Award for his nonfiction. Today, Caleb teaches English 101 as a teaching assistant and dreams of a successful writing and teaching career.
The conductor’s wife carried his balls in her purse, so he said. She was a bully, convinced that she was smarter than, more successful than, more desirable than he. Plus, her purse was bigger. In rehearsals, he had become so nervous that his baton kept slipping out of his hands. “What’s bugging you?” I wondered. “My wife,” he might have said─ but now I can’t be sure. At the podium, he watched my bowing arm for cues. My staccato, sautillé and spiccato all helped him feel the vibrations through his feet, he said. I wondered if he knew he was deaf. “I love you,” I whispered, to test him. He didn’t answer but launched into the latest story about his wife: how she’d taken to fishing out a can of Mace from the purse where she kept the balls, and setting it like a centrepiece on the table. He recited these details to me in the Green Room with his eyes squeezed shut from the effects of the spray. I held his hand, the one without the ring. I liked him to look less married, if possible, for the sake of my fantasies, which throughout my life have always been the best revenge against reality.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her latest series called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries. Most recently her writing has appeared in Gone Lawn, Sleet Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Pure Slush, and other journals. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.
When I walked into the room, they poured lava on my head and told me I was fired
but I couldn’t hear because of all the ash in my ears and the room was packed full
of people I didn’t know—a librarian who said I stole a book back in 1968, a penguin
who said I made half its family extinct, and my boss who looked like a hole in
an animal—and they were lined up, all with notebooks, all ready to slice me in
half, but I thanked them, because now is the time where all can collapse, so
you have to be gracious and smile and accept them shoving a mountain deep
into your guts, and I walked away after, heading nowhere, ending up in a grave-
yard where someone mowed the lawn like they had rivers of madness in their
lungs, just circling and spinning and weaving that machine into sand and
puddle and fence and I just stood there, jobless, watching this guy with a job,
tearing up the earth as if he wanted to erase every single thing in sight.
I’d chop off my eyes for a kiss
that’s how lonely my eyes are, my memories like rope, so god-
damn garden-level beautiful; I should have died for her, but
instead I just wrote poems. My God, I should have died and come
back to life. I should have done everything. Everything.
The magician who lives below me comes home
and looks wrecked, destroyed by magic, this slow trudge, and I’m a peeping tom, slits in the blinds, but so curious to see this
body, bedecked in motley, and so old and so young at the same time, a man-boy who’s never smoked, never drank, but greyed,
youth-aged, starving for money, gambling for fame, but coming home to this metal neighbourhood where crickets don’t even come,
just the soft sound of traffic in the distance, blending in with his footsteps, so tender, like rabbits that have been forgotten in hats.
I went to Niagara Falls
I didn’t get it. All that mist. I got back in my car and drove one thousand miles, to Kansas, where my ex- lives, happily, without me. I told her about Niagara. She drank coffee in her kitchen that was the colour of the Civil War. I said I didn’t get how people could go down that thing in a barrel. She told me her ex- would be home soon. They still lived together. Nothing in this world makes sense.
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Nanci Griffith’s “I Wish It Would Rain.”
A woman’s love is an extraordinary treasure! She will give you love, She will give you loyalty, She will give you, her dreams. She will give you, her future! She will give you eternity!
But many a man never knows the value of that treasure. He will possess her, He will desire her, He will rest his heaving passions in her. Like a plundering warlord he will only take again and again, And lay the remains to waste.
He will grow large from that tree of love, Not watering the tree with any affection. He will grow vines of neglect Subsuming her identity with weeds, That sap her of her strength and love! He kills the woman of her spirit, And dines off her carcass like a bird of prey.
And the woman’s heart is crushed, Like a river run dry No longer fed by the rain of affection. Violated day after day like the earth, Into whose wombs wells are bored relentlessly, Deeper and deeper, In search of the elixir!
The saddest sound in the Universe, Is the sound of a woman’s heart break! In the silence of the night She quivers and thrashes unseen! Gnashes her teeth at the impotence of her fate! Weeps soundlessly for herself, Longing to escape the coils of a loveless union, That trap her soul.
Tales of a River
She is a river of gold, Flowing swiftly in the golden dawn. The sun rippling beauteous in her joyous being She whooshes exuberantly over the rapids, As one by one she clears them, In her flow.
Worshipped by man Desired by man Who always sought to control her To contain her Fight over her For exclusive rights!
She is the river of discontent In whom waste has been dumped, by toxic relationships. She cries for release. The waves of agony crash Against the high rocks of indifference!
She is the turquoise river, Below the cerulean skies, The woods behind her, The shores distant. With a sky full of stars, She flows!
She is a ribbon of silver Sparkling in the moonwake, With the wisdom of the ages Running in her veins! Nurturing life, Healing the wounds!
She is a river emptying soundlessly into the sea Between existence and non-existence! In her existence, exists her identity In her non-existence, she loses not Just different ways in which she emerges, Her essence ever fragrant in her tributaries!
Avantika Vijay Singh is a writer, blogger, editor, script writer, poet, researcher, and amateur photographer. Poetry is her song from the heart to express her thoughts and emotions. Dancing Motes of Starlight, self-published during the pandemicin 2020, is her debut ebook on poetry.
She enjoys a good laugh, especially over herself, and her blog “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives”. She loves taking long walks in nature, which germinate the idea of many of her poems.
She is a lifelong learner and holds an M.Sc. (Zoology), an M.S. (Biomedicine) from BITS, Pilani, post-graduate Certificates in Sustainability from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden and Digital Marketing from MICA.
