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1. Do not assume this lake is suitable for haunting. Ask yourself: is it murky with life? Choked with algae? Are there bluegill? Whitefish? Midges? Are Pleistocene spirits already inhabiting these shores? Do you see the thumbprint of a giant sloth, a mammoth, tusk snapped by an unfortunately timed step, a single, petrified brachiopod? Epochs […]
In a blue cabin on the water, the old woman lies across three cushioned seats, her arms wrapped together like a hagfish knotting itself together before ripping flesh from whalefall She’s dreaming. It starts with a smear of light across a midnight ocean The island is a disc of smoking forests, a ripple of white […]
Content note: implied mass death On discharge, the hospital issues you a shining smartwatch— it ticks differently to wall clocks. The adults say not to worry, but a manikkūdu is a time cage and yours is narrowing You wonder how small you can become before it crushes you. When the kids invite you to […]
but why should that surprise you? you shattered the glass, all these pieces cracked and scattered across the floor isolated from each other, it was just safer that way. no one could see the whole picture. every self had its own world. now you […]
to bear life from within you to let it rip you apart from the inside out, tear through your flesh to escape into a world more chaotic than your mind. to hear it cry desire for not seconds, minutes, not hours, but for days, weeks, years. they make it sound so easy but if it […]
Pull off at the next exit and take the gravel road into the dappled green nothing, where life eligua’lat drips down as slow as deep time. Breathe heavy the humid air; it carries promise like shed plumage. Trace hope in dirt, fern and fossil. Watch as hours sprout scales: stoqonamu’gl, they are fir tree colored. […]
You were never mine— that is the truth, carefully avoided until the cracks began to show— love, but not love, here, but not here, hands held in shadows or stolen bits of daylight, your darkness mine, held like a secret, and I drank […]
Who doesn’t crave exquisite disasters? Vomit of roses, throat scored by thorns, blood- red petals fountaining from unkissed mouths. A heart can only hold so much despair before its roots thread needles through flushed flesh, fill lungs with flowers, choke with perfumed breath. And should a surgeon set scalpel to skin, remove the seed-hard organ, […]
in the milky light of a foggy morning i stand naked at your threshold/ a miniature boat clutched to my chest yèyé/ there are white pigeons in our backyard again this time they arrive in floating calabashes clad in indigo/ white corns & kola nuts hanging on their beaks behind […]
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