By Yati Ramli The house inhales at night. Its walls ripple with unseen lungs, doors sigh on their hinges, and the staircase beats like a slow heart. I wander room to room, listening for your footsteps. They are not here - only the hush of curtains, the small rustle of spiders in corners. Yet there is beauty in this haunting. The dark does not lie; it tells me everything remains, only changed - your laughter woven into floorboards, your shadow pressed into glass. The house exh

By Heath Sutherland Walls closed midnight velvet. Doctors seared brands into my skin - depression, anxiety, psychosis — The true word “autism” slept coiled in my marrow, a black rose waiting for its century to bloom. I was the boy who “saw” music and cried too soon: Jeff Wayne’s synths exploding violet galaxies, Meatloaf’s bleeding crimson thunder, each note a living shape only my skull could cradle. Beauty inside the looping torment that later tried to drown me. I lear

By Corrina Kehkét The girl sobs, and the birds sing and the birds sing and the birds sing wings tucked tight, the birds sing. Song and sob meet at a sun-stunned window screen, and the song slips past but the sobs bounce back, trapped with the girl who freed them. The trees softly sway to shyly wave limbs that bow and bend, that gently reach, Hers flail and fling, thrash and snap, crack upon impact with a cold patch of pale sky. The wind blows a breathy tune, a