poetry
Cause and Effect
Written by Doretta Lau, Illustration by Rose Wong
In this poetry collection Doretta Lau perfectly captures the tension that so often exists between spirituality and our lived experiences. Her poems are steeped in equal parts belief and doubt; the simultaneous feeling that there is something more beyond the realm of the senses and a hollowness brought on by the everyday. She plays on the tenuousness and necessity of belief in something more in a world dominated by churches nestled unobtrusively in strip malls, priestesses that take calls over Facebook Messenger, and systems that fail us. Belief compounds, but it also shifts, and even leaves us, returning when we least expect it to, gently tapping us on the shoulder when we can’t sleep at night.
Featured story for January 2020
“I have learned that time is not linear.
Each day, I witness experiences
circling back: a spiral.
Belief compounds.”
rose wong
Rose Wong is an illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY who earned her BFA in Communications Design with an emphasis in Illustration from the Pratt Institute. She has worked for clients such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Starbucks. When she’s not drawing, she makes zines and ceramics.
doretta lau
Doretta Lau is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? (Nightwood Editions, 2014). She is writing a comedic novel about an inept company struggling to open a theme park about death, and an essay collection about navigating volcanoes, illness, and other enormities on the worst timeline.