Catherine Joan Devadason
Contributor Biography
Catherine Joan Devadason hopes to bring joy to those who read her poetry and eat her bakes. She is working towards opening a poetry cafe one day. Her poetry has been featured and performed at Playeum: iOpener 2019. She has collaborated with Diverse Abilities Dance Collective to produce poem and dance performances (Speaking with Hands, 2019; Down the Rabbit Hole, 2020).
SUNFLOWERS
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Why are no two people the same?
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Pick this name: air dance / the night / clouds fly / hold tight.
Darkness on the way, open side l / move fast / fight the sun / rise standing.
Light hurts.
Keep eating
flying sunflowers,
candy red.
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our foothold
swords moving
all day
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since
before the darkness came.
a little light
appears.
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Shake
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The kiwi-coloured sky is broken up
by strips of strawberry. Nothing blends.
A cage of feelings droops from our tree,
the mother bird inside. Her wings
are down. Why does the future prick?
Trick? It hits me.
Ysabel Anne Aluquin
Contributor Biography
Ysabel Anne Aluquin is no stranger to trauma and to using her writing as a tool for recovery. A fresh film graduate and new startup manager, she writes to keep her mind sane and her heart open.
Toxic
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Sweet nothings dribble from the edge of his lips onto the tip of her tongue and she eagerly laps at the liquid, hoping that it would fill the gaps in her salvation. His teeth make their way down to her fragile neck, ready, waiting and open to only him. Like sharp razors, they cut into her thin cracking skin, slicing easily through the facade she had so carefully spent her life building.
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Glazed eyes meet his and she painlessly drowns in a sea of his lies, unaware of the way his waves of careless emotion slowly pulled and pushed her to the edge of her much-awaited end. As she edges her way closer to the brink, he pulls her closer into his falsely warm embrace, as if barely keeping her alive was better than killing her.
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Murder would have been so much more lenient; her punishment was to live in a constant state of love and anger, of hate and happiness. It was as if her being had been torn into two: who she was and who she had become, and she didn’t know which version of her was real. No mirror could show her truth for the glass was never broken enough to match how she felt.