“I can’t believe I have to miss Pig Day,” my twin brother Jeremy complained. He picked at the white medical tape on the back of his hand. The machine next to his bed whirred as it dispensed another drop of clear medicine into the tube attached to his arm ..read more

Back when I was a kitten, existing inside a hypothetical box a scientist had trapped me in, one where I might be dead or alive, from here or there, pansexual or not, I was definitely a fan of The Guest Cat, an audiobook that the young scientist, Soni, played at 2x speed while she worked outside my box, tracking waves and particles flashing above us overhead, like a planetarium show, muttering incompletely about radioactive decay and funding competitions to herself, and to invisible colleagues on her phone ..read more

The glass bottles are caked with so much grime you can’t see what’s in them anymore. It’s better that way because you don’t think you’d be able to do what you need to, if you could. You fish the knife out of your canvas bag, and a lighter with just enough fluid for one more flash of fire. This is your first time—but you’ve seen your mother do the same thing countless times before. Before she made her first mistake. Before you were forced to take her place ..read more

The world is ending tomorrow. That is what everyone was told. We panicked, of course. Looted stores, got into accidents, went to confession, got drunk ..read more

The muse calls me ‘Digenia.’ It is not my real name; that is suspended while I am traveling through these verses, now some 690 years old. To pass through this realm of allegory and myth, of device and symbiotics, one needs to carry a standard. Mine is of the ‘two-blooded.’ Twice-blooded, I want to say. Down through the ages, this language which I speak and write in has no words that contain me. There are plenty of hyphenated adjectives: Half-breed, mixed-blood. But, like the Great Mystery, symbols slide off me. Looking too close is dangerous. I might look back ..read more