Lulu Jastaniah
Ibtehal Jastaniah, known to friends and family as Lulu, is a fourth-year majoring in Global Public Health with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. A lover of poetry, nature, and impulsively cutting all of her hair off (wait for it…), Lulu is also deeply passionate about truth-telling, underscoring marginalized narratives through exploring ancestry and heritage, belly-laughs, and long conversations over coffee.
“OIL SEPARATION IS NATURAL—JUST STIR AND ENJOY” For those who also love peanut butter, you might recognize this informative directive from the lid of Smuckers’ Natural Peanut Butter, printed in white font, encircling a recipe for Peanut Butter Butterscotch Mounds.
Does anyone else get how absurd it is?
To hope, you have no choice but to do so wholeheartedly; it is faith and grace and courage, the heaviest and hardest, yet packaged as airy and leavened; it’s “the thing with feathers”, of course.
Nestled books
and nested damp hair.
Warm bread and blood-
bloodied
Bloodied bird striking bars; ceramic skull cracked open.
You could’ve held it between two fingers, that small stony thing.
Those steely feathers now matted
your voice buried in static;
(I have no idea if the purple flowers I saw were actually heal-alls but I am always itching for good omens)
I sometimes look out at birds and wish I was them. And mountains
Oh, the mountains,
Sending tears down their slopes
rippling and shaking
The first time I heard the word “diaspora,” it fit perfectly into my mind's holding place for funny words. Diaspora. I would try it on like a cloak-and-veil, whisper it under my breath, and brush it through my dark eyebrows. I’d write it down in cursive; Google it incessantly every time I forgot its perfect definition.
I woke up this past Tuesday morning to a too-bright-too-close sky; pale-yellow, opaque, equally begging for and denying sun break. No distinguishable clouds--just a blanket of sick-yellow--cloaking my apartment’s view of mountains, winding streets, train tracks, and industrial eyesores.
Truthfully and begrudgingly, this season, the existential swamp that is 2020, has brought about more questions than I care to count. Who of us hasn’t looked into the mirror and asked: am I doing any of this right? What will be my life’s greatest work? Am I doing it right now? (Just me?)