A sweet scent of olden times sweeps the air and I turn sharply,
searching for the guilty flora.
Unable to spot it quickly, I inhale
slow meaningful breaths full of childhood pleasures:
the rush of eating a berry plucked from a plant. The sweet taste of honeysuckle on the tip of my tongue.
A soft smile creeps at the remembrance of a time so far away.
Sonia Chintha is an Indian American writer who lives in the Washington DC area. She blogs, writes poetry, and fiction. She is also an English teacher who believes that our experiences teach us more than any test. She is the founder and co-editor of Good Little Girls.
Begin: again and again and again you can sit me down and point your scrawny finger at me, judge me, pierce holes of doubt on
Illustration by Deema Alawa Brown girl, fragile by Sonia Chintha I swim in the clear soup of your fragility A backstroke that inevitably feels like