Interstice
What light makes of me.
What memory might make yet
of me. Therefore, there
is no therefore, and all consequence
and lack thereof erases, has erased
the tactility of being. The fibre of it,
the fat melting between my molars
chewed to nothing or almost
nothing, and then what? What
does it mean if you won’t taste it
on my mouth later? I’m attempting
to uphold a condition such as
the one where water bends
around the heft of a ship. Will you
challenge me? Will you move
closer? & will you make
your hands move across,
through me, ruin the way
I bend? I can wait, was built
for waiting. Here, is static,
static I have been, and I doubt
it will change, but within the slide of time
into ever thinner planes of space,
there is a tension threaded
by your presence, my response
to your presence. Have you noticed,
what your noticing can make
of this that it has not made of me?
Notwithstanding the sense of indigo
and its hues which daily arrests me.
Notwithstanding all this which has passed,
will pass into nothing.
Tasneem Maher is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh, where she is at work on the poetics, politics, and affect of Palestinian speculative writing and media. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Online, VIBE, and BAHR Magazine, among others, and she was the 2026 winner of Propel/Cambridge Poetry Prize, selected by Bhanu Kapil. She is in line with PACBI, and she calls on you to reject Zionism everywhere, in all its forms.
She will be with us from November 2026 through February 2027. 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 via the link below.