{"id":39521,"date":"2026-04-03T13:08:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T20:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=39521"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:08:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T20:08:17","slug":"issue-97-wasima-khan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-97-wasima-khan\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 97: Wasima Khan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Wasima Khan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She is the winner of the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize and the 2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sky Island Journal,<\/em> and elsewhere. Previously, Wasima worked as a law lecturer, a legislative lawyer for the Dutch government, and an investigative journalist. She is currently working on a poetry collection and debut novel. Wasima\u2019s work can be found at:
https:\/\/www.wasimakhan.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on “Stranger Fruits Grow Here”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStranger Fruits Grew Here\u201d began with a memory of looking up. As a child, I often searched ceilings and corners for shapes. I believed the house might reveal what the adults would not while I was growing up in a family where emotions were rarely spoken aloud. When I tried to translate that early estrangement into surrealism, the crack shaped like a horse arrived first. It felt like secrecy disguised as imagination. From there, the poem unfolded into a story about what families choose not to name.

I was thinking about how silence becomes ritual. The mother\u2019s boiling pot grew out of that thought: the sense that nothing is said, yet something is always being prepared and thickened. The objects in the poem \u2013 glass coat, blank calendar, bird-mirror \u2013 emerged slowly, each one carrying a weight I did not want to explain outright. In writing, as in life, what remains unsaid often has greater force than confession. The broken line \u2013 \u201cwho disappeared \/ in the middle of \u2013\u2013\u201d \u2013 came from my reluctance to specify loss. Some absences feel truer when left incomplete.

The greatest challenge was maintaining tenderness. It would\u2019ve been easy to make the parents monstrous, but I was more interested in their attempts at care \u2013 sweaters, fruit carved carefully \u2013 alongside their failures. Love and silence often coexist.

Only when I finished did I see that the buried fruit was the heart of the poem. What we put into the ground \u2013 secrets, omissions, unfinished stories \u2013 does not disappear. It grows. The ear-shaped fruit was my recognition that silence ripens. When the speaker lifts it and it weeps, the sound is grief, but also acknowledgment. The poem became, in the end, less about what the parents withheld and more about the moment the child chooses to listen and understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When I write, I\u2019m naturally drawn to music that feels close to what I want for my poems. In the evenings, I listen to the legendary Nina Simone, whose voice carries the sense of someone revealing and concealing hard truths at the same time. Some nights I let Arooj Aftab fill the room. Her songs more or less hover in the air, unhurried, as if time has briefly agreed to stand still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier in the day, I drink chai, and I try to treat it as a ritual rather than a routine. I crush cardamom pods and listen for that gentle crack. Sometimes I add ginger, often a shard of cinnamon. There are days when the tea tastes ordinary. And there are days when it feels medicinal, almost holy. Either way, it marks the hour. It reminds me to be patient with small pleasures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samosas pair beautifully with chai. I\u2019ve been trying to perfect a family recipe built around nine spices: cumin, chopped coriander, ajwain, kalonji, whole coriander seeds, ground turmeric, ginger, green chilies, and a hint of nutmeg. Folding the samosas is the part I love most. I seal the edges carefully. A few still burst open in the oil, but I forgive them and myself. There may be little imperfections, but they make no difference to the taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For joy, I simply walk at dusk without headphones, listening to the ordinary choreography of my neighborhood: doors closing, someone calling a child home, a dog protesting the end of the day. There is peace in witnessing without recording, in allowing a moment to remain unarchived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing monumental. Just these small rituals filled with calm and softness. They are enough.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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Featured in Willow Springs #97<\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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