The Heart and the Stomach
Fists of smooth muscle curl in sleep
clutch at hunger.
Sticky with a sick feeling
they anticipate the winter tundra
of empty cupboards.
They are stirred into living
by a shushed conversation
between the Fog and the Sea.
I press my face to the bloated Fog
the beast has eaten everything
and the Sea has eaten
everything else.
I am left with the air
and memory of ice-cream
flavour of salt
and nicotine sweat
seasoning the white whipped hour.
Without witness I inhale
until the colour is inside
and around me.
I do not end or begin, I become
the blistering of burning film.
The Fog hisses at my fevered kiss.
I flinch at the pause in conversation.
It is the season of unfulfilled things
of hungry things.
In the hills bears sleep
their fists of smooth muscle
curl and clench
around a wanting feeling.
Sairah Ahsan is a writer, scientist, and researcher who lives on the Welsh coast. Her home, amidst the gorse and estuaries, inspires writing about the queer, surreal, and thalassic. Under the alias Rakyah Assam, she has been published in Extra Teeth, Nawr, Lucent Dreaming, I Zig and I Zag and in December 2022 was shortlisted for IS&T’s Pick of the Month. She is in her second year of a creative writing PhD at Aberystwyth University, crafting a bildungsroman concerning personal and diasporic identity.
Sairah will be with us from November 2025 through February 2026. To find out how to submit poetry prose, word & image, filmpoems and reviews to her please check out our submissions page here.
IS&T internships run for 4 months each consecutively, and in order to go some way towards redressing the balance in publishing, will for the foreseeable future come from the Black, Asian, Latinx and others from the global majority (ethnic minority in the UK). More details are below.