Machinal Pull yourself together You did this to yourself You made it this way Tell the story The story of a helpless creature A being who did not ask for this Any of this Sometimes the stories we tell Are not just reflections of us Sometimes we create As a cry For help God help us all Why would you…
All of this feeling, all of this wistful, all these memories in the shape of phantoms, the snakeskin of your arms around me? This nomadic heart which always finds its way back to you? The soft underbelly of rage, which was always secretly an armful of sorrow? A shrapnel of grief? A mouth like an open wound? Your name engraved…
A Flat Tire You contemplate the car sitting back on its round rubber haunches as if it were some lame exotic animal, the last of its convertible kind. Pity in your eyes, you bite your round rubber lip and put your ear to the warm tire like a stethoscope to listen for the telltale hiss. You hope only to diagnose…
Black Houdini For a while, he’s been missing our Mheshimiwa— A shepherd unseen A leader heard A presence unfelt A true, black Houdini. Five party-branded calendars Cheap and unseemly Used and discarded After having angered our visitors Marred our living rooms. No word from his honorable person No help from his hired personnel. No progress report on his projects Stalled…
Plunging blade into white water, my older cousin leaves girlhood in the smooth wake of creamless strokes. Later, I creak the vanity open, knock over bottles and jars and hunt on Barbie-like tiptoes for the can of Barbasol. I fill the bath with water so hot it turns bathroom to…
Aaron Cullers studied Writing for Film & Television at the Vancouver Film School and co-founded independent film team Pasquinade Films, which produced multiple feature-length and award-winning short films. Aaron’s screenwriting has been produced and screened at the New York International Independent Film Festival, Hondance, and others, while his stage work garnered a Best New Playwright award from the Fitton…
While Voice to Books has covered graphic novels and memoirs in the past, we couldn’t help noticing how many intriguing books from underrepresented communities have been published in the last three years—stories of difficult journeys, both physical and spiritual; of searching for one’s place in a new culture and finding an identity within a subculture; of intergenerational trauma and…
Bleached bones, picked clean by a lion, are left to bake under the East African sun, says the reedy-voiced British narrator on the nature film I watch from beneath a mound of covers. The abandoned bones stop the elephant matriarch in her tracks. She raises her trunk to trumpet a call of distress across the plain, lamenting the death of…
Reviewed by Dave Oei At under two hundred pages, Lost Ark Dreaming is a lean work of science fiction by Nigerian author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Focusing on the lives of three residents inside a massive building called the Pinnacle several hundred years from now, Dreaming is a gritty, tense thriller. It’s also a succinct and merciless examination of society under…
Reviewed by Jackelin Orellana The Forbidden Daughter by Zipora Klein Jakob is the biographical account of Elida Friedman, a woman who defied all odds to survive the Holocaust. Elida’s life itself began as a protest when her mother, Tzila, bravely defied a Nazi decree forbidding Jews from giving birth in Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto. Tzila hoped to become a mother, despite…