The Ether

It’s more than dishes tattered with mandazi scraps and grease, more than craters  bruising the sky like neglected fruit. It’s more than trash gorging itself gradually at the rim, more than pennies gasping for air as they drown into dimes. It’s more than clothes tattered as the hungry mouth forced shut, more than parchment brittle,…

Brown feet on brown steps  preserve cadence  carved in woodgrain  resounding echoes  trapping years in space  like spirals inside a trunk or molten wax taking new shape. My father’s feet drag  two beats behind my mother’s and mine.  My brother’s feet clamor  toes cacophonous, a broken wind chime sails and clappers erupting  aggressive against the…

I pressed my hands into the earth—the dead grass, brittle, snapping under the weight of my palms.Soot blackened the crescents of my nails,the air thick as something just burned.But soot is only another form of paint.Bareness twists itself open,revealing possibilities stitched into its ribs.Periphery becomes perspective. I’m learning the alchemy of language:how a single word…

I am grateful for the road that never changes.How else would I notice the way I unravel—threadbare as a being in motion—if not tethered to a path that rejects permutation? I am grateful for sedimentary rock,its countable layers offering certainty.How else could I soothe thoughtsthat ricochet quietly,like misremembered constellations—or the fading pulse of the cathiding…

It begins then, in silence, in bartered brushes of two shoulders equally committed to a pretend game: Pretend not  to feel something tremble awake,   only to hold it still,   unspoken, quiet as breath,   this fragile ache   both of you pretend   not to feel. Pretend not to parse meaning from gazes that linger a beat too…

There’s an empire forming around me,Etched in fractured cobblestone and loosely laid bricks–fragile enough that I contemplate the idea of a stronger foundation,compare it to sultans of a victorious age,then consult the textbook monarchs, seeking their silent validation. But tonight, I wonder: is comparison the thief of joy?As the stars vie for attention in a…

now that our bodies reveal truths long buried beneath bone— i envision an eclipse, prolonged by power, hidden by force. engulfs us once again. once again, we are echoes, ligaments torn asunder— we are victims of the promise of youth, discoverers of the shredded map. when the sky fell, time stood still for only a…

The news came with a smile, your father’s lips curved,   as if the words were light,   as if the weight of them   hadn’t yet settled in his chest.   He’s dying, he said,   and the room stayed quiet,   but for the sound of your sister   breathing beside you,   her breath catching,   your breath stopping.   You’d only…

penned 2021 ephemeral thing better left unsaid  briefly i was haunted by adulation, memorizing every reverberation of his nervous chuckle. if only he could be soothed by the knowledge that i was a bundle of fickle nerves heart constricted and constrained, balancing on thin tightrope as his eyes glittered with the knowledge that he’d incapacitated…

under june sun needles of grass fight fiercely for a spot tucked beneath my pinky toe and billions of loam particles. others disperse once this spot is taken crawling their way to the arch of my foot, cooling the carefully stretched muscles. they are low viscosity beings. i caress them with all 5 of my…

To let you love me, was to let me love myself– a thought that came to fruition as the physicalmemories distorted themselves into fixtures of light.Fragmented into two distinct distillations ismy disjunct recollection of what happened in July. I have a trifling tendency to remember theGood Times. Like when we explored your roomTentatively, propped up…

i approach new music like a grieving widow. it’s a soulful, spiritual procedure that requires a full body dedication to appreciation, and yet i crave it so. this doesn’t mean there are few variations in my manner of listening. rather, every time i decide to dust off my headphones or my crusty jbl, my listening…

Tujiangalie is sweet reminiscence, glorious resistance, and God’s merciful grace packaged into three minutes and forty-one seconds. My ears were first blessed by the melodies of Sauti Sol as a result of their classic hit, Short and Sweet. My family had just arrived at our village home in Nandi County. As we passed the unfinished…

Mama conceals confusion with glitter-tainted grins. She’s using two hands to grip the pan and dropping  pillared pittances onto our plates. Instead of incandescent gratefulness we’ve lifted our noses at bartered blessings of ugali and spinach. This demarks our Machiavellian shift.  See, Mama and Baba leave us with hushed whispers and  forlorn gazes. Four years…

Applying the true nature of the hypercube, or tesseract, but giving it life inside of the Marvel realm that accurately depicts its qualities as a 4-Dimensional measure polytope would be challenging, but not entirely infeasible. Its current depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe features the tesseract as a 3-Dimensional, light blue, glowing crystalline cube which…