Elegy for a World That Already Ended

Alesha Khan, Pakistan

I sit in the corner of my room for three hours or maybe four

or maybe the sun has set and risen and set again. Who knows?

We wake to the same jaundiced sky.

At dawn my thumb sifts the ash of another headline,

another ceasefire that opened its legs and gave birth to nothing.

The sky is a bruise that grows teeth.

There is silence in olive trees, where birds used to sing.

Now it holds a funeral for a sound that we never learned to mourn.

Now it lactates a thick, red milk that no one admits tastes like metal

And we drink it with our hands over our eyes.

The smoke writes no obituary.

Spring was a rumor buried with the bees whose testimony we scrolled past.

They unzipped themselves in midair

each one a tiny, wingless uterus

that aborted the future mid-flight

No one has time, not for each other and not for the grief.

We scroll through fires and floods and swipe to a woman dancing.

No one thinks about the spring that will not come or the fall that will not leave

or the bees that died so quietly we forgot they were ever here.

I think of the time when air smelled of wet earth and flowers.

I pace in circles while thinking and end up where I started.

I watch men in suits decide who eats and who doesn't,

who lives and who becomes a number on a ticker.

They say it's progress when the river runs red.

The lie is a seed that germinates in our gut after swallowing.

And we obey because what else is there?

What else but to bow?

And call it survival, adaptation and anything that helps us sleep.

We run until our legs give out and then we run anyway

because stopping would mean looking up and looking up

would mean seeing and seeing would mean admitting.

Alesha Khan is a young writer from Shujabad, Pakistan. She loves writing and published her works and many national and international magazines. She is also a recipient of Literary Icon Award, received in April 2025.