by Tiffany Aurelia
The palm opens—a map of being.
Everything has left me except for the hum
in my chest and we search
for familiar things. I bring my hands
closer, trace each palm line
to the past where an ocean from
three summers ago
pools into the shape we make when
we carry a weight we cannot keep forever.
Somehow, I’ll forever know
how to braid my sister’s hair the way she wants it
best, crack open longan fresh from the branch.
All this warmth.
Every tear that has warmed and sprouted
comets across these fields.
His fingers softly exhaling against mine. The
horizon of a mother’s arm skimming hair.
Once,
my grandmother and her grandmother moved
the same. And I think about how it is in our anatomy
to bear the crease of memory.
To touch. To hold. In the palm’s heart line,
all the people I’ve ever loved
have left their footprints
behind.
Every flexion is as human as a home.
Like I could put my hands together
and hold a whole language of becoming.
Great Rising
by Shane Watt
Tiffany Aurelia is a SoutheastAsian writer from Indonesia. She writes to explore the intricacies of memory, heritage, time, and her cultural background. Her work has won runner-up of the Woorilla Poetry Prize, been commended by the Young Poets Network, and appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Emerson Review, The Shore, and more.
Shane Watt embarked upon a career as an artist in the early 2000s that has since seen his work exhibited internationally, including in Montreal, Lagos, Miami, and London. He also exhibited in New York City with the Ricco Maresca gallery at the 2023 Outsider Art Fair. He has completed several art residencies, including in Barcelona as part of a 2015 urban residency at Jiwar and in 2023 in Copenhagen at the Christiania Researcher in Residence program. His work has appeared in several publications including El Pais, Muzzle Magazine, and The Guardian, which described his map, “Shutterbug,” as “a ‘mash-up map,’ inspired by a long-distance relationship . . . it includes features from Montesquieu in south-west France, Athens, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia.”
Ignatian Literary Magazine 