The Silence My Mother Sewed

By Fizza Abbas

As a child I tasted chalk walls,

a mineral sweetness I could not name.

Cracks hid under the white,

stitched like my mother’s sweaters,

each thread a silence she kept.

Music drifted through the room,

Lata, Rafi, soft on her hands,

falling like small inheritances

I did not understand.

Mannequins watched from her shop,

plastic tongues halted mid-speech,

waiting for a language

that never reached us.

A blue-tinted moon waited above,

carved bright as cut stone.

Between sky and ocean,

limestone thinned to cement

and shaped itself into a single dot.

FIZZA ABBAS wanted to become a neurologist, but her brain gave up halfway through, so she now plays surgery games.

Art by Shrivaani Poddar