2024
“Homeland in Verse”
khōréō magazine
audio by R. P. Sand
Jan 2024
850 words
You find the first verse of homeland encased in the abdomen of a fellow gym-goer. She is aggressively flirty as she pokes a finger through your curls, and when she takes off her shirt to flex—It’s hot in here, isn’t it?—you’re ready to walk out and find somewhere else to lift your weights. Then you see it: tiny towers made out of her liver peeking from within her rib cage, a maze garden carved into her small intestine. A perfect miniature of the city your people have been trapped in for generations.
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2023
“A Small Bloody Gift”
FIYAH Magazine
Jan 2023
6200 words
…A single blood bee lurches away as she looks up. Red frosts the ends of its elongated proboscis. Its abdomen is engorged beyond understanding, body is almost too heavy for its fragile wings to support. A distended crimson sac visible below the innocuous fuzzy back stretches the creature to the length of Kehaka’s thumb.
Kehaka understands in a quick, cold moment that her grandmother has died…
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2020
“Suit.co”
The Seventh Wave
April 2020
3000 words
…Her heart in her throat, she picked up the object and looked at it with different eyes. It was unlike any suit she had seen before, a shade of caramel just paler than her skin. It took her several seconds to realize that the soft part in one hand was a clump of hair. Abruptly, she understood she was holding a suit of skin…
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“Body Snatcher”
Black Warrior Review
March 2020
5000 words
…It was something about that air, Nee decided later. The silk that rippled in time with Maria’s voice. Watching Maria smoke as she spoke, her lips parting—the way she traced circles with the blunt and set the fabric aflame—Nee wished for her short, strong fingers. Lesbian fingers, they had heard from a passerby a few days earlier, a man who stumbled away with a black eye and the jeers of the crowd chasing his retreat. Nee reached for the hand that had dealt that punishment, ached for the way it held the pages that ripped the world apart…
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