[FLAGRANT SPLENDOR OF A TIME WHEN]

we should be cutting back but according to whom? “How’s your bonnie wee bairn?” “You mean
my kid?” Thin strands of light hit the blanket, next to my... but must everything happen in
relation to some kind of self? We didn’t care about the money, the real thrill was being a team,
a group of people with a shared transverse relationship to the law—to what was just as well as
where the concept of justice didn’t obtain. No womb to speak of: was that just? What’s
gathering in my cervical crypts: lube, rosewater spray, cute little demons released when we
opened the portal, the miniscule print from the Dover edition of Maimonides’s Guide to the
Perplexed, the last transmission of Voyager II. I’m a voyager now, too, bidding my “au revoir” to
the heliosphere, every moment the furthest I’ve been from home, but traveling towards a
darkness not cold, empty, and inhospitable but rich, fecund, thick, and plural

[AND THEN I PULLED, REDEFINING YET AGAIN INSIDE AND OUTSIDE]

Pulled you in, receiving as much as I could. Solar radiation producing mental fuzz. What does it
mean for cloth to have a nap? What does it do to touch the nape, and why? Industrial drones
clunk on and off, the action of the motor that powers the elevator, the sound of the cable, the
elevator itself as it halts with a clunk. You said that already. Sometimes my words are fewer in
number, fuzzier, less precise. Writing revenant when I meant remainder, but I also meant
something undead or undying but not strictly speaking alive. Lively (echo: animate), Flora calls it
a current. Spirit, ongoing. Sharpen and refine the design, the form of that which will not die in
me. Die in me, like an ode by Horace, a piece of kale roughed up by my molars, a crumpled
Chrysler. Die in me like a hero, a martyr. I’ll admit you, welcome you, into my ephemeral
structure and, squeezing, smooth the knotted muscles of your hand, undying fabricator of your
art, making of it a key to my body’s vault. Open the portal and the creatures come out.

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Bedroom Vowel (Bunny Presse), Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light), and the chapbooks Vape Cloud of Unknowing (Belladonna*) and The Book of Bella (DoubleCross Press). Zoe is the co-editor of Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Bark Brown. She teaches literature and creative writing classes through her school, Threshold Academy.