Stephanie Luka was born in 1997 to a Dutch mother and a Congolese father. She discovered her fascination with the arts only after quitting her career as a professional gymnast and entering the University of Amsterdam at the age of sixteen. Her work emanates mostly from dreams; it strives to acknowledge and interpret these fragmentary, illogical shards of truth, and to (re)construct them in a way that fabricates considerable lucidity and relevance without repudiating the ambiguities present. Stephanie has previously been featured in Allegory Ridge, International Times, Dissonance Magazine, and The Metaworker.

Observations From the Lighthouse

The waves, like Virginia’s, they speak
in glistening voices dripping
with honey from the bee or the sea
creatures, with gold sun guiding them
towards divine timelines of tropical
tenderness, baffling allure looming
low – they speak of rotten revolutions.

The waves, like Virginia’s, they
are sticky and sweet, licorice-like,
but also infused with the maritime
marrow of underwater sand-
storms, and tears discharged
from eyes fighting against the
stingy salt intruding their globes.

The waves, like Virginia’s, they
are form and they are matter,
they carry and they kill, they are
all one another and they do not bother
to microwave the milk, to scrub
the shame off the shells that open
and close for fish to feast on and
enter; those shells that leak white
powerless heat, plighted perpetually
to stay inside and safe from predators
prowling and planning to pounce, for

the waves, like Virginia’s, do not
bother with funeral processions
either, nor with crystallised ceramic
urns or headstones that crumble
as the seasons take turns torturing
the tattered tar. But the ocean does
bury all:

each wave
a burial.