West Bengal, to North Pacific

So here’s to the empirical formula: we are the night, rainfall and starlight revolutions, wicked weather south of the Columbia,

pears on apple trees, hailstorms in Floridian tropics, mangoes growing like peaches, plums planted precariously to climatic frenzy of free beauty Georgia. Opposites attract, physics never lies,

our magnet is fierce independence that runs wild through family blood. Ferocious sardonyx, fluid topaz, café au lait in sunlight; genes burnt with irony, conscious—

mutations in the mind, what sets us apart. Mornings dipped in green tea, the smell of distant evergreens,

webbed toes in the water, we swim together from tsunamis, floods that drown most apart. Seven years later, the same mistakes never made, I’ve seen less fortunate,

this flowering life was born into home, and for that, planets aligned. To chromosomes deep in acids, fires at heart, to bonds that flow covalent to womb,

to a science, a history, our ancestors, kept vibrantly alive.

Read more from Issue No. 2 or share on Twitter.