Our fathers glitch by fifty, hearts freeze framed mid- pump. Our mothers metastasize, pass errors womb to womb to breast. I enter GodMode: swallow the tail end of life and cheat death / cheat code / cheat this failing body, this inheritance I never asked for. GodMode is a common cheat code in video games, giving unlimited ‘lives’. By Jack … Continue reading GodMode
Matryoshka tiger-skin lancer: dot of yellow, I clasp your maimed torso; it is like a tiny, weightless bolt, and then that spill of oil: dew on a stark summer morning. By Joseph Bullock Continue reading The Wasp
You’ve changed, where’s the pink ha-ha? Those words linger like a bad smell as we stew like sardines, too few people for a party. I’m wearing something black and too tight and it’s a stinger, your words slice me like the butter knife we use to chop up cake on the coffee-stained counter. Crumbs coat everything, stick to the bottom of plastic cups we’d both … Continue reading Pinky
I’m walking into a room made up images.
These are all images of myself
I assumed them from my figurative past,
Now they’re gathering dust on the shelf.
6 years old.
‘That’ day has come
‘lay down’ ‘legs apart’
Hushed.
‘Strip.’ Forcefully stripped.
Continue reading “Female Genital Mutilation// The Air We Breathe”
At one her father and mother locked eyes
The birth of a girl brought dread to their lives
A parental love, too strong to watch ache
Emerging through doors, a babe in blue awake. Continue reading “Bacha Posh”
This house
Is empty there is no
Tenant here they’ve left you left
First but left the door open
In case you’d come back and you
Did, shield yourself from the Continue reading “Better an Empty House”
Your new
Intelligent, Independent, Innovative,
Vocabulary feature
Will make your life easier. Less
Malfunctions.
Faster day-to-day interactions
– Update now? –
I remember how it had once tasted;
The sweet air
The stale fumes
The incomprehensible fly to the flame,
Wondering how he, too, fell for the light. Continue reading “Where These Words Came From”
our fruit king smells like rotting onions, majesty
of prickling green whose skin is the shell
of spikes. his treasures are the orientalists’
fantasy, whose rich gold beyond all
the wildest imaginings Continue reading “Ode to the Durian”
