Two Poems
by Trae Stewart
Mint Tea in Tunis
The glass—a talisman,
pinched at the waist,
engineered restraint.
A vessel calibrated for danger.
Inside, tea burns amber,
tilted toward spellcraft,
sugar dissolved beyond consent.
Mint rises—green constellations,
leaves bruised by deliberate fingers,
knowledge transferred skin to skin.
The pour initiates the rite:
a lifted wrist,
liquid arcing into brief flight,
then surrender.
Elevation teaching control.
Steam loosens—
a djinn with no interest in bargains.
The first sip scorches,
a sermon delivered to the tongue:
heat as truth.
Then sweetness arrives—
thick, coaxing,
arguing pain is transient
but memory is adhesive.
Mint cuts through—
chlorophyll blades
performing mercy,
drawn carefully across the burn.
Inside me, leaf and fire convene,
neither yielding jurisdiction.
The street curves toward the glass.
Time thickens, turns syruped.
Sound dulls, then rings—
voices struck like metal
underwater.
For a breath, Tunis is contained:
sun and shadow steeping together,
history unhurried.
I drink again.
The tea responds—
measuring, evaluating,
deciding which parts of me
are permitted to remain.
When the glass empties,
heat persists—
no longer pain, but instruction.
Something old has passed through me,
left warmth as residue.
I set the glass down.
The afternoon resumes its architecture.
But my mouth retains
another taxonomy of fire—
sweet, intentional,
disciplined,
impossible to cool.
What Remains Is the Name
The ledger does not remember voices.
It keeps names
the way stone keeps weather.
Ink thins them—
first names clipped,
surnames reduced to angle and sound,
each letter taught restraint.
What they carried—
heat, breath, refusal—
falls away.
A name survives
because it fits the column.
Beside it: numbers,
patient, unquestioned.
Weight outlives hunger.
Profit outlives the hand.
No verbs remain.
Only alignment.
Only sequence.
Only the illusion of order
where lives once misbehaved.
Some names lean,
as if tired of standing.
Others repeat—
fathers folded into sons,
difference worn smooth.
The page never flinches.
It accepts everything
as equivalent.
To be written
is to be finished.
To be finished
is to be counted.
The ledger closes.
The names do not leave.
They stay,
held flat,
waiting for a mouth
to give them back
their weight.
BIO: Trae Stewart is a professor, author, and psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner. His work has appeared in Switchgrass Review, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, San Antonio Review, Medicine and Meaning, and Dipity Literary Magazine, among others.