Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Four 2026 as part of the Path to Nirvana column

Design by Jacaranda Liu

Content warning: mentions of miscarriage and suicidal ideation

Ask the beached fish

drying out on a salt-stained step of 

a white stairwell by the sea. 

Ask the lobster with its tiny feet tracing

endless circles on the bleached sand.

Grief is an ocean.

It is the golden ratio of a gigantic wave

crashing over and over;

a world so blue you cannot breathe.

1. The Tower

I tried to build the Tower of Babel 

with the bucket I used for sandcastles. It stood

erect on a shore of foaming, ivory waves. 

I built the tower of white salt, smooth and naked,

gleaming like a blooming lily.

I learned how to extract the salt from the sea;

to recognise the savoury tang that

lingers in its waters, unforgettable, irreplaceable, alive—

minerals from a bygone star,

so different from the sugary fruits in the garden. 

It sears the tip of your tongue, 

leaving behind a bitter burn.

I learned to coax it out with my fingers,

my heaving and laboured body, and turn it into 

a lighthouse—a cathedral—

that surges into the realm of God.

2. Black Sun

Lightning struck from the empty sky.

My tower crumbled into the sea below,

dissolving in the water and the air.

The clouds were graveyards in the distance,

glowing under a cruel sun. 

Ask the fish how it felt to have its roe dry out.

Ask the lobster how it felt 

to be brutally ripped from its shell.

It felt like ten swords in my back; 

the shrivelling of an infant in its mother’s womb.

(I thought I was pregnant, because I was so hollowed out.

I didn't bleed for two months. If I was, it must have died.)

All that was left was grief, rolling around and 

above and over like an endless tempest.

As the oceans roll over me, I fervidly imagine 

the lightning. How I wish for the lightning to come

once more, fiercer and deadlier than before. 

How I wish for it to pierce my body and grant me

the peace of forgetting.

3. Oblivion

I live on a desert island in a blue, blue dome,

separated from where goodness and humans roam.

(I dwell somewhere between the earth and the oblivion.)

In the distant future, where the waters may be calmed, 

I will find a sword nestled in the seabed of white sand.

I will cut away my memories and the Karmic ties,

like the severing of an umbilical cord. 

I will forget the taste of salt, 

the sweet and sinful tangs that burst across my tastebuds in

tiny sparks of heat. 

I will forget the ocean, the waves, the lightning.

I will wake up from the dream—

the blue grieving dome. It will be lost in space, 

a glass orb floating somewhere in the universe.