by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 28, 2026 | Featured, Prose, Uncategorized
Thunderstorms. Fireworks. I’m in the spare bedroom/office. Chrysty’s in a rotten bad mood. she walks the apartment like a donkey stable. kicks holes out of drywall and violently washes up plates. she’s told me get out and I’ve...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 27, 2026 | Featured, Poetry, Uncategorized
How to get here Among the joys of love was when we got our first apartment on a boulevard above the trams and tree-tops and the wires that cut the street like tangram puzzles and our friends would come with olives and cheap wine they found the...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 26, 2026 | Featured, Poetry, Uncategorized
Khair At the feet of al-Ka‘ba you asked for a daughter. You named me Khair – Blessing. I answered inside you forcing myself into your ribs remaking you in the emptiness of your lungs. in the space he made— his shoes left in the...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 25, 2026 | Uncategorized
Bay Laurel My last will and testament is to be buried under the bay tree flourishing in my back garden. Standing there, year after year, like a planted woman taken from again and again. One day, her leaves will no longer replenish. But for now she...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 17, 2026 | Reviews, Uncategorized
When Karen McCarthy Woolf begins Unsafe with an epigraph from Romantic poet John Clare, the son of a farmer who witnessed the rights to the countryside transfer from common people to private landowners, we are promised a grapple with the...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Apr 28, 2026 | Uncategorized
Morning mis-en-scène Silence draped across the furniture like fine webbing to catch intruders. Toys left mid-performance, before bedtime’s siren, you marching upstairs. Night made an exhibit of you, a collection of imprints in the mess. I give...
