Shae: 5 Poems

CORPSE FLOWER / HEIRLOOM

say i’m foul—my mother was too

the grave keeps good records:

your disgust is my inheritance

you flinch—i grin, teeth full of family history

i open wide—/haaaaghh/—and the family scent escapes

Invisible Hooks & Other Domestic Crimes

the world ran

& hopped past me

i spat my youth into a drawer

decades dangled

on invisible hooks

i clapped

& tallied my missing limbs

YOUR STIMS ARE YOUR SYNTAX

f l a p f l a p . . .
f l  i  p f l a p—flap
i  hear  the walls hum back,
the floor trembles like it’s laughing
feathertwitch, sidewaysslide,
in the dark, dark
hum tap fold
your hands write the grammar of the world,
again, again, again . . .
spin, circle, echo
and still:
YOUR STIMS ARE YOUR SYNTAX
everything else is translation

Dear Brittlestar

There was a sound behind the sound.

I peeled myself to verify.

Tore—tore—through chest, through floor,

I opened—

a diagram, not a wound.

Eyeless.

(All eyes.

All eyes.

All eyes.

Everywhere.

Everywhere.

Everywhere. Still they would not look.

Still they would not look.

Still they would not look.)

A body full of watching.

bureaucrats in love with their staplers

the clock scolds me
into a future
I was never made for.

grief keeps time
by erasure.

babe, time’s a bad landlord—
always raising the rent
on rest,

keeping the lights on
just long enough
to call it care.

Shae is a queer, autistic goblin interested in the intersection of disability justice and design, collecting tiny trinkets and having an unwavering devotion to Shrek as both art and ideology.