Today, I sit here, not as the storm
But the calm before it.
My note said I was in crisis.
That urge to unleash hurricanes
Beneath my heels,
Cyclones with snaps of my fingers,
Typhoons with the click of tongue.
You tell me to breathe through it,
Gusts of grief escape my nostrils.
Coastlines wallow with my cries.
Bolts of lightning I’ve taken—
From turbulent loves with
self-proclaimed Thunder Gods,
Voltage somewhere in my circuits.
My throat has swallowed
My own deaths
Like a river carrying souls
To the afterlife.
We speak of grounding techniques,
But I am what happens when
The Earth cracks open.
You write down new acronyms—
Like I’m not an anomaly,
Like there are 10s of me
in your waiting room
All splitting like skies.
You say my body holds trauma.
A lightning zaps
From my brain cells to bones.
But sure, it’s only trauma.
AUTHOR BIO
Arshi Mortuza is a Bangladeshi writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of two poetry collections, One Minute Past Midnight (2022) and Pressed Flower (2026). Her work breathes life into characters from literature, history, and mythology, reimagining them in contemporary emotional and psychological contexts. She is particularly interested in the human psyche and the unexpected directions that emerge through spontaneous and creative writing.
