How dare you!
How dare you pull this mantle from your sloven
sleeve and think it worthy enough to cover my boy.
How dare you judge when you also wallow in this mud.
Society has turned its power over to you,
relinquishing its rule, turned it over
to the man in the mask, whose face never changes,
always distorts, who does not live where I live,
but commands the corners, who does not have to await
the nightmares, the street chants, the bullets,
the early-morning calls, but looks over at us
and demeans, calls us animals, not worthy
of his presence, and I have to say: How dare you!
My son deserves a future and a job. He deserves
contemplation. I can't turn away as you.
Yet you govern us? Hear my son's talk.
Hear his plea within his pronouncement,
his cry between the breach of his hard words.
My son speaks in two voices, one of a boy,
the other of a man. One is breaking through, the other just hangs. Listen, you who can turn away,
who can make such a choice; you who have sons
of your own, but do not hear them!
My son has a face too dark, features too foreign,
a tongue too tangled, yet he reveals, he truths,
he sings your demented rage, but he sings.
You have nothing to rage because it is outside of you.
He is inside of me. His horror is mine. I see what
he sees. And if my son dreams, if he plays, if he smirks
in the mist of moon-glow, there I will be, smiling
through the blackened, cluttered and snarling pathway
toward your wilted heart.

—Luis J Rodriguez

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

by Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds—
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

We are sitting in the kitchen when I ask her if she still loves me.

As she answers, she begins to remove all of the things I don’t like from a paper container of fried rice—the peas, the carrots, the chicken—until there is nothing left but browned rice and slimy onions.

I feel her doing the same thing with her words—spoon feeding me answers of little substance because she thinks I like the taste of them, how easily they slip down to my stomach.

She’s right. I eat it all.

I’m still hungry late into the night.

tried to post this in the lemmy.world community since it's more active, but it loaded for like 10 minutes before i gave up. i'm curious if it'll work here.

It is in August when the rains fall thickly and your ghost disappears. I am seated on the porch swing, my feet dusting the floorboards, our farm fields overrun and expansive in the distance. I am work-weary, grief-stricken, manifesting moisture of any sort. Our son joins me, his hair tousled by the day, his feet a soft padding down the hallway. I saw Peter’s ghost, he says, pausing to shovel blueberries into his mouth. I saw Peter’s ghost on my bed when I woke, and I wish I could see you like he does: Peter’s ghost sat next to me on the bus, Peter’s ghost did a cannonball off the diving board and soaked my whole class, Peter’s ghost rubbed my back while I barfed in the bathroom.

But I don’t see you at all.

You mean Dad, I whisper in our son’s ear, pulling him closer, he was your dad.

Our son cries and I rock us back and forth. The air is unmoving, stale.

You used to join me here at dusk, when the falling light made it dangerous to flail blackberries along the ditches, when you couldn’t hold the steering wheel or shovel a fence post any longer. You’d rub my feet, I’d rub your hands. We’d light a fire, watch our son marvel at the magic surrounding him.

Tonight, our son will wake next to me on the porch swing sobbing. He will say: I saw Peter’s ghost at the barn, at the barn, at the barn, and, for the hundredth time, I will wish he hadn’t followed me there that night. That I hadn’t told you I was worried about the rains. The run-off from the river. The momentum that builds when water has nowhere to go.

“It’s cold in here,” the woman says, lighting a cigarette, blue smoke catching in the light of the laser.

“It needs to be cold to work,” I say, “and there’s no smoking in here.”

In the reflection of my computer screen, I notice her looking around the lab. Her left arm sticking up, the still-lit cigarette in between thin fingers, right arm around her waist supporting the left elbow.

“I need to know why you’re here,” I say, punching in the code for the entanglement.

“Why?”

My chair squeaks unprofessionally as I spin around, “Because, what if I send you to another reality where whatever brought you here has already happened?”

I wait. This was usually the time where either the reality of what they were about to do hit them or their brain began doubting what I was saying.

Her body slumps a little, “My son died.”

I nod and spin back around with a counter squeak from my chair. Typing in random coordinates, I let the quantum machine hum on the desk. The black box was doing its job. It would be a few minutes before she spoke again.

“Is that it?” she steps over, staring the flat black box.

It was unimpressive at best. I could hear it in her voice. Just a small six-inch square metal cube, humming as if thinking, which it was.

“Yep.”

I took in the full measure of this woman. Tall, well-dressed, nails impeccably done, hair unimaginably soft with expensive products. She had money. It wasn’t cheap to buy a new life, a new reality where the tragedy never happened. Or a new life where they were rich, or a woman, or man, or had no children, or their mothers loved them. But these days, it was mostly a dead kid. Word must be spreading.

“How long?” she asks.

“Couple minutes.”

On the edges of the machine, I could already see the white frost. It was working hard, finding the right coordinates to send this lady back where her son was alive and well.

“How does it work?’ she steps closer to the oblong ring in the center of the room. A see-through sheet of clear glass covering the opening.

“I don’t know.”

Twisting in surprise, her perfectly tailored eyebrows raise. “You don’t know?”

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” I smile at my joke.

The temperature drops ten degrees as the glass on the portal changes.

“It’s a mirror now,” the woman whispers.

Letting the air out of my lungs, I say, “It’s not a…seriously, didn’t you read the contract?”

Hugging herself against the cold, she stares at the woman staring back at her, “Most of it.”

“It’s a reflection from a similar world as ours. She’s you, looking at you from another dimension. Okay?”

Raising her hand, she waves at herself in the next world.

“She’s not the one I’m going to replace, is it?” stepping closer to the aperture.

“No, but that’s the closest world to ours, so it comes up first.” I kept typing, the humming box slows, and the cold stabilizes. By this time, it was nearly forty degrees in the lab.

“So, I just walk through here and boom, I’m back with my son?”

“More or less.”

Another flash and the woman in the reflection is gone, only a copy of my lab staring back.

“Hey, where did I go?” she says, upset.

“Well, the other you is probably doing something else. Like at work or with your husband,” I hesitate, “Or with your kid.”

The words sting. Enough for her straighten her back and almost jump through the portal. This was the moment.

“There’s a little business we need to take care of,” I say casually.

Shaking hands pull a silver ring from her pocket, she touches it to mine. On the outer ring, my credits jump six figures.

Reaching over, I pull out a silver box and open it. Taking out the small device, I walk over and hand it to her. “Now, you do know what happens next?”

“I go across, and my son’s alive.”

“Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I mutter, dropping the round object into her hand.

“Oh, you mean the fine print? Yeah, I read it. I need to kill the other me, then take over her life.”

I nod, “Place this within ten feet of her, and there’ll be nothing left.”

Hefting the ball, the woman asks, “Then what?”

“Then you live with the guilt.”

A curt laugh escapes her lips, “No guilt here, buddy. Besides, it’s me, right? I can’t really feel guilty replacing myself?”

I don’t answer. Instead, I say, “Safe trip.”

She’s two feet from the portal.

“Now?” she asks.

“Anytime.”

Placing the ball in her pocket, the woman steps through the glass window, disappearing from this world.

“What happened?” she asks, stunned.

“Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I ask.

“Yeah, but...”

“You went through. I’m the other guy in the other lab.”

It always took a few seconds for their brains to figure it out. Multiverses, other dimensions, portals. And I look slightly different.

“You know where to go?” I ask.

Her face changes; she knew where to go. It was her life, after all.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t get caught,” I call out as the woman leaves.

“Hey.”

I turn and see myself looking out of the portal.

“Hey,” I say back.

“Did you send anyone today?” I ask.

“Yeah, he wanted to be rich. What’s with her?” I nod to the door.

“Dead kid.”

“Damn,” I say.

“Things used to be so simple. Now there’s all this emotional baggage they bring with them. I mean killing yourself, who does that?”

Staring at myself, I look well dressed, thinner, and have a wedding ring. Turning back, I mark the coordinates in the computer and smile.

“It’s a lot to think about,” I tell him.

For the unfamiliar, IFComp is the biggest event in the IF community, with usually 50+ entrants each year. The link is to all the games—which are, of course, free. Consider becoming a judge or donating to the prize pool!

For the familiar—what are your favourites this year? Which game do you think will win?

image version

The Figure

You sit at a window and listen to your father
crossing the dark grasses of the fields

toward you, a moon soaking through his shoes as he shuffles the wind
aside, the night in his hands like an empty bridle.

How long have we been this way, you ask him.
It must be ages, the wind answers. It must be the music of the wind

turning your fingers to glass, turning the furniture of childhood
to the colors of horses, turning them away.

Your father is still crossing the acres, a light on his tongue
like a small coin from an empire that has always been ruined.

Now the dark flocks are drifting through his shoulders
with an odor of lavender, an odor of gold. Now he has turned

as though to go, but only knelt down with the heavy oars
of October on his forearms, to begin the horrible rowing.

You sit in a chair in the room. The wind lies open
on your lap like the score of a life you did not measure.

You rise. You turn back to the room and repeat what you know:
The earth is not a home. The night is not an empty bridle

in the hands of a man crossing a field with a new moon
in his old wool. We abandon the dead. We abandon them.

image

One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.

Image link

After attending a talk where Kuo Jiang Hong spoke about how she once asked her mother whether her late father, Kuo Pao Kun, was really a Communist.
(Further context for non-Singaporeans: in our country's early years, the government was very militant in purging all traces of communism. Kuo Pao Kun, a playwright who wrote very political plays, was detained for over four years without trial on communist conspiracy charges, among others.)

The flipside of a conviction is an acquittal.
The upside of total despair is my denial.
There can be no downside.
There can be no middle ground
in this memory of home written on bare walls.
One man's life pivots upon a cutting edge
so let's pray the wind doesn't blow.
When innocence falls by the wayside
the flipside of anger is a calm demeanour.
But silence can be a strength, just as
too many words can be troublesome.
Do not trade kisses for hard knocks.
Do not trade your eye for my tooth.
There are nightmares we do not rise from
while too much time has taken flight.
The curbside of a road is where
the wildflowers come to life.
The flipside of a flipside brings us
somewhere else. And we cannot be sure
if we have turned or returned.
In the end there is only my conviction.
Do not doubt me or your father. Just come
warm your frigid hands by the fireside.
The flipside of a prolonged winter is
this incandescent bulb that pretends to be the sun.