Dear Readers,
Happy New Year and welcome back to Tea & Oranges! I hope you’ve had a restful and joyful holiday — to ensure a level of woke-ness and inclusivity of course — and a very happy new years! I am so very excited for everything we have in store for you these coming weeks, and look forward to sharing even more beautiful pieces for our upcoming volume. For our very first piece of 2025, we have a poem from Toronto based writer, Grace Lu. Grace’s poem, Stuck, encapsulates the feeling that so often afflicts us upon the return to normalcy after the holidays. The feeling of stagnancy in a world that stops for no one, and just how powerless one may seem. It’s a beautiful piece that feels wildly empathetic in its nature.
I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do, and I am so very happy to publish it as our first piece of the new year!
Anna, Editor-in-Chief
I am still, I am stagnant In a moving ocean The waves lap and pool around my calves Licking at my taut muscles, and my locked legs Wondering why I'm not moving And so do I, I do. The city blurs and beeps with taxis and tourists, and people pass me by Shoving me with shoulders and a passing eye. The dust in cold alleyways flock to fill this welcome space. I grow old in stationary actions, the crowd brushes my frame heavy with age. They are always in constant movement And they don't know why I stand. Uncommanding, unmoving, unfulfilling, -unhand me the journeys, the hard work, and spiderwebs. Clinging to my eyes, Dusting my own cobwebs Unnatural and estranged. The world is just so curious. Does she stay to watch the motion or motion nothing to stay? So people will pass her by and not question the disarray. Like a backwards scene her lifestyle plays a broken record, stuck on a note. Stuck on a lyric. Stuck on a track. What to say? This girl simply cannot get past today.
Like everyone’s moving forward, seasons change but still I’m stagnant.
Time sometimes is rubber and bounces back.