By: Tasmia Islam Aurin

Fathoms of the Mind

Splintered light—
a glimmer, a ghost—
flickering between reason and ruin.

Echoes of laughter,
fractured, hollow,
carving tunnels in the marrow of thought.

Desire—
a hand reaching through fog,
grasping shadows,
mistaking them for home.

Memory drifts—
salt-stung, half-erased,
names dissolving like whispers in tide.

Who are we,
but echoes of want,
but vessels of longing,
but whispers dissolving in the wind?

N O T H I N G N E E D S U S

(after the void)

The stars are dying. No one writes eulogies.
A clock without hands laughs in an empty room.
We are hollow statues, mouths full of unspoken alphabets—
each vowel a fossil of a god who forgot
to drown.

The library of Babel burns. Pages confess
to dust. What’s left? A syntax of shadows,
verbs dissolving into static. I carved a name

into the wind—it spelled absence. The moon
is a bone tossed to dogs.

The Name is a word the wind dissolves.
We build cathedrals where spiders preach
sermons of silence. The altar: a mirror
shattered into a thousand eyes. Kneel here. Pray to the cracks.

A telephone rings in a derelict train station—
each dial tone a requiem for connection.
Love’s fugitive currency rusts in our palms.

We trade it for stones. The last telegram reads:
“No one is coming. The wires are cut.”

The ocean inhales its own horizon,
a thirst that drowns every lighthouse’s cry.
Time unstitches itself.
A child’s red balloon
drifts into the stratosphere, becomes a comma
in a sentence no one will finish.

Machines dream of their own obsolescence.
Gears grind into a language of rust.
The earth spins like a roulette wheel,
betting on nothing.

We are the croupiers
of our own extinction.