After the men cut our voice boxes out, women began swallowing birds. We had to endure months of fighting down a choking sensation, but perhaps we managed because of the words we’d swallowed for years. The trick was to know that the bird has no agenda of its own. We remembered what it was like to nest something within our bodies. We made sure to eat worms, grubs, seeds regularly. We no longer ate poultry. Finally, when the birds nested within our bodies, we were able to warble and coo in a language the men couldn’t understand.
Those of us who had found our new voices were banished, and we made a compound at the wild, forested edge of the town. It was a ramshackle hut, wings added as new members arrived. We held them in the crooks of our arms until their shock settled. We found birds for them, helped them with the swallowing. Rejoiced when they opened their sweet trilling for the first time. Our chorus grew in complexity and timbre.
Occasionally the men approached with fists and daggers and words of hate. We let our birds fly out and answer with their hooked beaks, their sharp talons. Sometimes the men returned to hiss and pace our perimeter, but that was no longer relevant to us. We had the earth to till, water to fetch, children to teach.
There was a large, warm, communal kitchen always with a pot bubbling on the stove smelling of earthy cumin and heady lemon, always something in a tin in the oven, rising like witchcraft. The children ran in unruly, laughing packs. They approached any one of us with their cuts and bruises and we tended them on our knees, with our cooing, with a loving peck.
Soon all the women had joined us. Soon we were complete in our togetherness. Soon we felt at home. All it took was time, space, food, affection. At night, we would huddle in groups, arms winged over each other, a shoulder for every head. We slept more soundly than we ever had.
Today, we wake with the sun, and ruffle the sleep from our eyes. We run outside to offer the day our salutation. Our birds are the yellow of the happiest day of a child’s life, and the blue of a sky that knows it stretches to infinity and the velvet dark of blameless sleep. We stand, us women with our children. We spread our wings and murmur into the sky, twisting and rising as one. We dance and laugh and play as if we are the wind itself.
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Microfictions 2024. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?) You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 sumitrasingam.squarespace.com.
If prayer persists, it’s primitive reflex. Reflux. A regurgitation.
If prayer persists it’s because solutions do sometimes fall from the sky—NaCl, acid rain—
your breath might still slow their descent.
If prayer persists, it’s a rare species of frog burrowed in your throat,
surviving both drought and saturation.
It’s just the tongue’s instinct for preservation. A language
is lost every fourteen days. You fast forty days.
Prayer is counting the words that dry on your desert lips.
If prayer persists—it’s a moment of being held, suspended, swung before immersion in the river.
Your cousin’s hand at your wrist. This is not exactly safe.
If prayer persists it’s a gasp for air as you swim up from sweat-drenched bedclothes,
nightmare—or love—stuck in your neck.
If prayer persists it’s only echoes of the incantation whispered when your head was white with vernix and your legs meconium green. That magic spell:
you’re beautiful,
you’re mine,
you’re divine.
If your prayer persists it means you aspirated during baptism, and all the red wine spilt on
your white shirt since cannot wash it down.
If prayer persists it’s a snatch of a song. An ear-worm.
Some parasitic fluke boring holes in your heart.
Or it means you swallowed a watermelon seed and now
a vine winds itself through your hepatic portal vein.
Or it’s just reverberation of fatty acids metabolised by microflora
blooming along your gut, activating a nervous hyper-sensitivity
to phytoestrogens. You’re not a girl anymore. Take this
square of dark chocolate and this fist full of earth.
you’re beautiful, you’re dirt, you’re divine.
Kathryn Reese writes poetry & flash. She lives on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Kelp Journal and Australian Poetry Journal. She was a winner of the Red Room Poetry’s #30in30 competition & the Heroines Women’s Writing Prize 2024.https://instagram.com/katwhetter? BlueSky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social
Melissa Fitzpatrick lives in the Los Angeles area. Her recent writing and artwork have appeared in such places as Epistemic Literary, JMWW, and Tiny Molecules. Find more of her work at melissa-fitzpatrick.com.
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Flash fiction – Sumitra Singam
/in Roots, Issue 1Bird Swallowers
After the men cut our voice boxes out, women began swallowing birds. We had to endure months of fighting down a choking sensation, but perhaps we managed because of the words we’d swallowed for years. The trick was to know that the bird has no agenda of its own. We remembered what it was like to nest something within our bodies. We made sure to eat worms, grubs, seeds regularly. We no longer ate poultry. Finally, when the birds nested within our bodies, we were able to warble and coo in a language the men couldn’t understand.
Those of us who had found our new voices were banished, and we made a compound at the wild, forested edge of the town. It was a ramshackle hut, wings added as new members arrived. We held them in the crooks of our arms until their shock settled. We found birds for them, helped them with the swallowing. Rejoiced when they opened their sweet trilling for the first time. Our chorus grew in complexity and timbre.
Occasionally the men approached with fists and daggers and words of hate. We let our birds fly out and answer with their hooked beaks, their sharp talons. Sometimes the men returned to hiss and pace our perimeter, but that was no longer relevant to us. We had the earth to till, water to fetch, children to teach.
There was a large, warm, communal kitchen always with a pot bubbling on the stove smelling of earthy cumin and heady lemon, always something in a tin in the oven, rising like witchcraft. The children ran in unruly, laughing packs. They approached any one of us with their cuts and bruises and we tended them on our knees, with our cooing, with a loving peck.
Soon all the women had joined us. Soon we were complete in our togetherness. Soon we felt at home. All it took was time, space, food, affection. At night, we would huddle in groups, arms winged over each other, a shoulder for every head. We slept more soundly than we ever had.
Today, we wake with the sun, and ruffle the sleep from our eyes. We run outside to offer the day our salutation. Our birds are the yellow of the happiest day of a child’s life, and the blue of a sky that knows it stretches to infinity and the velvet dark of blameless sleep. We stand, us women with our children. We spread our wings and murmur into the sky, twisting and rising as one. We dance and laugh and play as if we are the wind itself.
Poetry – Kathryn Reese
/in Roots, Issue 1Post vespers
After MG.
If prayer persists, it’s primitive reflex. Reflux. A regurgitation.
If prayer persists it’s because solutions do sometimes fall from the sky—NaCl, acid rain—
your breath might still slow their descent.
If prayer persists, it’s a rare species of frog burrowed in your throat,
surviving both drought and saturation.
It’s just the tongue’s instinct for preservation. A language
is lost every fourteen days. You fast forty days.
Prayer is counting the words that dry on your desert lips.
If prayer persists—it’s a moment of being held, suspended, swung before immersion in the river.
Your cousin’s hand at your wrist. This is not exactly safe.
If prayer persists it’s a gasp for air as you swim up from sweat-drenched bedclothes,
nightmare—or love—stuck in your neck.
If prayer persists it’s only echoes of the incantation whispered when your head was white with vernix and your legs meconium green. That magic spell:
you’re beautiful,
you’re mine,
you’re divine.
If your prayer persists it means you aspirated during baptism, and all the red wine spilt on
your white shirt since cannot wash it down.
If prayer persists it’s a snatch of a song. An ear-worm.
Some parasitic fluke boring holes in your heart.
Or it means you swallowed a watermelon seed and now
a vine winds itself through your hepatic portal vein.
Or it’s just reverberation of fatty acids metabolised by microflora
blooming along your gut, activating a nervous hyper-sensitivity
to phytoestrogens. You’re not a girl anymore. Take this
square of dark chocolate and this fist full of earth.
you’re beautiful, you’re dirt, you’re divine.
Hybrid – Melissa Fitzpatrick
/in Roots, Issue 1