How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

THE BACK SEAT OF MY MOTHER'S CAR - Julia Copus When I inititally came across this poem, and read through the first half, I wasn't very impressed. It wasn't until I finished it when the full impact of what I had just read hit me. The poem is written in a form called specular, in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first. The second half is really just the first half of the poem read the other way around. I love the idea of it. I think it's an excellent way of portraying two different perspectives of the same situation. Julia Copus developed the technique herself. WOW. We left before I had time to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in, cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping the dusty August air. I pressed my ...

I wrote this poem on behalf of my mamu (my mom's brother for you non-Urdu folks:)) in December 2010, for a friend of his who'd been diagnosed with brain cancer a while back. He'd been my mamu's roommate during his graduate years in Purdue University and from the stories I got to hear about him, he must have been a force to be reckoned with. Bursting with life, exceptionally bright; he'd bagged the best of both worlds. He was in love with football and all things sporty, and he was also a brilliant student. He got married, he started a family, but it seems to me that life's got a taste for melodrama. The next thing you know, the doctors found he had a brain tumour. And it only got worse from there. Cancer is such an ugly disease. I don't understand it, it's always the last thing you expect, you always think you're immune to it but just when you're least expecting it, it rears it's head and strikes. His cancer had spread too far and wide to ...

I've spent the past ten summers of my life in Ha'il, Saudi Arabia, where my dad worked as a college professor. My mom, my sisters and I moved to Pakistan, because education is a big problem there for people like us who never got the hang of Arabic. Anyway, my dad moved back home last year, which means no more vacationing in Saudi Arabia. I miss it, and I don't miss it. I miss the silence of the desert, how the ringing of the phone and doorbell was a special occasion, the hot, dry wind whipping my face, everyone dressed in black and white wherever you went. That's what summer will always mean to me.  The summer air coils itself around our house Winds along the white trunk of the eucalyptus tree In our front yard Whispers through its ghostly leaves Makes them dance -just out of reach. The summer wind licks my face A candle flame, caressing me in the darkness. It smells of dried-up twigs and withered leaves Desert plants that have learn...