May 2025
Yes, No, Goodbye
The dead don’t like to wake.The darkness was torn away and I had flesh again, had eight arms prickled with goosebumps and eight legs fidgeting and four heads filled with nervous chaos. I was annoyed, of course. Who likes to be summoned? But these girls were earnest, and unpretentious, and piercingly open, and they had […]
Transubstantiation
I wake to you quietly singing to our daughter, an invocation from mother to child. You fold her to your breast and urge her to drink. Like the moon reflecting sunlight, she is given form by your love. Her translucent skin reveals organs struggling to become real, to move from the phantasmic to the biological. […]
To Be a Woman Is to Be Without a Name
i.For most of her fifty-three years of life on Earth, she was called Mama Jide by everyone except for her son. He–the ‘Jide’ from which her identity was coined–called her Mummy.And so, when she died and it came time to make posters announcing her death, and write obituaries to go in newspapers, the first question […]
Eight Legs of the Mother Hunted
Eight legs, fleeing. Eight babies cling to my back.Over my black exoskeleton, my children scuttle on sticky feet, pitter-patt-pitt, trying to hide from you.Your torches shine violent orange in my eight eyes.You drove us from my cave with your foul smoke and shouts.But I’m fast.I charge through the dark forest, trampling shrubs and shaking pines […]
Entropy in a Fruit Bowl
At eleven, my friend Mel resurrected an apple. The tree divided our field, so it was appropriate that I was present when he trespassed through the boundary of life and death. The apple clung to its branch all winter. It held through the frost, but the chill turned it shriveled, black, and greasy. When he […]
Robot, Changeling, Ghost
Shivering, she pours her child a bowl of sugar-frosted cereal. The soured milk is two weeks expired. The body of her child has been buried in the local cemetery a week longer than that.Three weeks of rotting under tightly packed soil while a robot sleeps in her child’s old bed. The dead’s soul roams untethered […]
Editorial: Grandmas All the Way Down
I suspect my grandmother has moved into her next form. I can hear the spirits of my Dad and others that have passed, but I think Grandma is larking about as a toddler at this point. Maybe even riding a bike without training wheels, it’s been that long. She was always a quiet spirit. Her […]