Summer 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 3

If my pain could speak

it would rip every piece of flesh off my bones

It would shear through fragile threads

of clarity

Scream, an injured animal frothing

It's better to bite through skin

than stay present

My mother is a surgeon. Over a decade ago, in a dimly lit hotel bathroom, she pulled my skin taut, wielding a disposable razor like a scalpel. I was dressed not in the traditional surgical gown but a still-wet bathing suit that reeked of chlorine. My armpits were generously lathered with shaving cream and prepped for surgery. Once you are told by a medical professional that a procedure is necessary, you resign all control to them, sign whatever forms and waivers, do anything you need to just get the thing done. So, I let my mother shave my armpits for the first time.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it. I had begun to notice that my armpits were unlike everyone else’s. My hair, coarse, black, and a little bit too pube-like, was something I knew to be ashamed of, even if I did not actually feel ashamed. I sweat-stained every shirt I owned, tie-dying the pits a yellow-brown. In shirts without sleeves, the hair glistened with moisture, spilling haphazardly outwards.

Although Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth evolves the traditional depictions of queer female characters from their roots in science fiction and gothic horror literature, her portrayal of Dulcinea Septimus—while viscerally powerful—derives from a long and sordid history of disabled antagonists that permeates not only gothic horror, but English literature as a whole. The depiction of villainous disabled characters often serves to marginalize or “other” the nonnormative human body. Dulcinea’s active role subverts the traditional expectations of a chronically ill heroine, who is often not afforded any power until after her untimely death in gothic horror narratives. However, in doing so, she also plays into pervasive tropes which negatively color the treatment of chronically ill persons in the nonfictional world by propagating ideas of symptom exaggeration and the disabled body as a vessel to paradoxically conceal and magnify villainy.

In Pakistan, disability is often viewed as a limitation — a burden to be endured, or worse, pitied. Yet, for those of us who live with a disability, our reality tells a different story: one of strength, struggle, and above all, dignity. The concept of dignity, though rarely discussed in our society, is the foundation of a meaningful life. It is not something granted by others — it is an inherent right.

As someone living with a physical disability in my right leg, I have journeyed through the harsh terrain of stereotypes, systemic barriers, and silent stares. But I have also witnessed resilience blossom where society expected despair. This is not just my story — it is the untold story of millions of Pakistanis with disabilities who carry dignity not as a privilege, but as a defiance.

Elon Musk wants to be in your dreams.

Perhaps dreams are the last lonely place,

last true horizon beyond which nobody sees.

thunk-thunk-thunk.

Gradient coils hammer rhythm

into my vertebrae,

like a god trying to knock

from inside my skull.

The tech says: Hold still.

Where is God?

Where is God now?

The warm summer sky moves its benign clouds

as with a gentle west wind, but devoid of guidance...

A few years ago, three women helped save my life: the Explorer, the Warrior, and the Lover.

“Whatever it is…it has to come out of there.” Doctor Jennifer, the explorer, is talking to Shelley, my wife and lover, in hushed tones as though whatever-it-is should not be heard by other patients in the recovery area. I’m waking up from a routine colonoscopy. In my haze I turn my head enough to see the frown on this spindly young doctor. Even in the fog of anesthesia, I sense Doctor Jennifer is going to begin using the C-word. A more pervasive fog descends as Shelley drives us home and tries to calm my anxiety. The mist of fear makes me blind to the colorful trees of autumn.

Earth is too crowded. It’s not just the billions of people that take up every available surface that vex me, but the billions more that have dearly departed and now crowd every inch of atmosphere. It is inescapable; I’ve summered on space stations and contracted across the colonies, but the dead still haunt such places. Violently, more often than not, matching the anger and pain of their sudden, vicious deaths that always befall those that dare wander off-Earth.

I’ve tried everything to escape the dead short of joining them on a more permanent basis. As part of my “condition,” I sometimes find myself outside my body, walking through walls like the ghosts. These wanderings have led me to believe that there is no other form of “afterlife,” due to the sheer number of spirits that have accumulated. And if I were to join them, there would be no guarantee that they’d finally leave me alone.

Oscar lies on the porch

Like a dream stretched out

His tail twitches with palsy

His whine tells me how

He’s chasing rabbits in a field

But the whine becomes a bark

And I know – dogs have nightmares too

But what could a dogmare be like?

I fainted for the first time in my life last night.

When it happened, I’d been walking across the wooden floorboards in the hallway with the sudden, disturbing awareness that my head felt like a foreign object, somehow disconnected from the rest of my body, from this entire plane of existence. I was clutching a small paring knife in my hand. The last thing I recall before blacking out was the sensation of the sharp blade scraping against a textured wall as I fell. I was extraordinarily lucky I didn’t hurt myself.

After coming back around, I found myself sitting in the corner of a dark alcove, my back against the linen closet door, staring up in confusion at my father as he walked past. He didn’t see me. The bowl of fruit I’d been holding was upright on the floor, the knife lying inside it. I had no idea how much time I’d lost.

On a cold wet day He brings them

one soft as a new cloud when held to a cheek

a second sharp-quilled and speckled

There was a man.

A white man.

A man so big and large,

stocky like a tree.

I could not resist.

I must combat, for my love lies with another.

I can’t, I tell myself.

I can’t, I tell myself.

I can’t, I tell myself.

But I did.

In a poem about a goldfish,

               I eat little flakes of brine shrimp and lecithin.

               I catch them, floating, on the edge of my lip,

               and I do not forget to eat until 3pm

               and then wolf down a peanut butter sandwich.

woke up that morning in high school

          to a man’s deep scream,

sky purple & pink

          like swirled Trix yogurts.

somewhere, a boy not much older than me

          called out to God between sobs.