July
Pakistan
A million years ago or just
Yesterday
My sister and I – the Canadian foreigners on a summer trip to the “motherland”
– run to the rooftop as the sky tears open for monsoon season
After this summer, my sister and I grow up and a p a r t
fight
over boys and clothes and obedience and religion and she marries an
orthodox man twenty years her senior just to escape our father’s home
And I blah blah just to do the same …
Poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
Bio:
SALMA HUSSAIN writes poetry and prose. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Fiddlehead, the Humber Literary Review, the Temz Review, Contemporary Verse 2, the Antigonish Review, the Hong Kong Review, and Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her young adult novel The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. She lives in Toronto.