Breakfast With Ghosts : Steve Bruce
I fry eggs in the fat of regret.
Butter toast with missed chances.
The kettle chuckles at every stupid thing
I wish I hadn’t said.
We sit.
Don’t speak.
Only eat,
in separate rooms,
like old friends
who can’t remember why
they fell out.
Steven Bruce is a multiple award-winning author. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous international anthologies and magazines. In 2018, he graduated from Teesside University with a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Born in England, Steven now resides and writes full-time in Poland.
Of Joys : Vinita Agrawal
I could say there was a flood—
but there was only ever a thimble’s worth,
a sip, a moth-wing’s tremor of light.
There was no ark, no vessel of oak,
just a paper boat, folded and fleeting,
dissolving at the first touch of dawn.
Smiles, fragile as spider silk,
laughs, tiny as pollen grains,
happiness, fleeting as bubble-froth.
Yet how it carried me.
I held mirth like a dandelion seed—
so slight, so easy to crush between fingers
still, enough to plant the sky.
It is now, cradled by the unseen,
a wisp in the fluorescent ether,
while I gather my fragments:
an eyelid’s flutter,
the brush of knuckles against cloth,
the hollow of a collarbone cupping air.
Gratitude is this: not the feast, but the crumbs,
not the symphony, but the hum
of a single string, plucked and trembling.
I could say there was a flood—
but I am learning to love the damp,
the small, the almost-not-there,
the way dust loves the slant of light,
the way a breath clings to the world
before letting go.
Vinita Agrawal has authored six books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, the Proverse Prize Hongkong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA.
On a Call, After Your Leaving this City : Garima
night. at 9, I ask her, tea?
chasing some semblance
of normalcy.
*
the beckoning of the coast
we answer
in a city –
neither mine nor yours.
time suspended for two days
precisely, in
Kabir’s finely-spun shawl
*
until summoned by the everyday.
only our pixelated shadows stand side by side
in your poetry that whispers places to me
Garima is an MA student currently based in Chennai.
Paper Cuts in the Margin : Daniel Abukuri
Secondhand Faulkner in a plastic bag,
the spine already cracked like knuckles.
Someone’s underlines in blue say
“Notice the mud” three times.
In the break room I highlight silence.
Outside, a bus coughs in a sentence.
Inside, my professor said “Metafiction”
like a spell that failed. I nodded anyway.
It was never the plot. Always
the way the comma curled like a secret.
You can’t really explain it to people
who’ve never cried over a semicolon,
or who think Neruda only wrote
about peaches. I once read Baldwin
in a laundromat until my socks were ghosts.
The country wants a story with
a gun and a god and a wedding.
But I keep giving it ellipses,
line breaks, unreliable narrators.
It does not clap.
I dog-ear the truth.
Fold it down like origami teeth.
Even when the paper bleeds,
I keep reading.
Some of us were never written in,
but we showed up anyway.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri is a Ghanaian poet and literary critic. He is the winner of the 2025 Nocturne Ash Dark Poetry Contest and a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Lolwe, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Eunoia Review, Spillwords, Poets for Science, and elsewhere.
Parcham Online 
Leave a comment