POETRY BY EMILY LORETTA FLUMMOX

Emily Loretta Flummox (Grok Amiri, Pope Uncommon the Dainty, Sertor Ualerium Tristissima Liber, and 14 other names; pronouns: fey / fem / fear / fierce / femself and 2 other sets) has had stories and poetry published in Wickedly Abled and Scry of Lust 1 & 2 (all Iconoclast Productions). 

A member of two National Poetry Slam teams, fey has been focusing on short fiction and role-playing game content, including professional Game Mastering and actual play livestreams. 

Fey won the Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant (2022) and the Serena Toxicat Memorial Grant (2023) and has a B.A. in Latin (minor: Religious Studies) from Santa Clara University. With Sumiko Saulson, Skunkheart teaches courses at the Speculative Fiction Academy. Fey is currently preparing both fear first poetry collection Like All Who Live, We Eat Death and the TTRPG TrueWill-inspired Reality Layer (TWiRL) for publication later this year. Follow fem at linktr.ee/queermythopoeia

KISS ME, I’M A PRINCE

A friend of mine 
once told me that nicotine and caffeine combined 
would cause a dead frog’s heart (simulating life with electricity) 
to explode like ravens 
fleeing from the prison that once held the Crown Jewels of England. 
What would happen, I wonder, if that amphibian 
simulated life not by means of 
electricity, but by means of 
90-degree 90-percent-humidity nights? 
Would that dead heart 
tackle the stars like an overeager football player?

I feel amphibious 
on nights like this, living in air and water, but 
doing the frog one better by living in both 
at the same time. I float 
in this heat like a bar of soap, 
and love to smoke when I feel like this, 
tobacco fleeing my lungs like ravens
like a hurricane
forming letters in the air like the asteroids 
on which my moth ancestors huddle. 

My ancestors’ words smell like coffee and pile drive the stars down to earth, 
bouncing off a frog’s heart 
with boards beneath. This is the floor on which I stand, 
on which I argue the Law, and 
on which I shoot the people I love. I challenged them to these duels,
regretting my actions as the glove comes off my hand, before it even reaches their cheek. 
Nicotine makes the heart go big and caffeine makes it go fast. My heart can't take this—
it hurts to float and I can’t get clean. The electric Law and the deep air 
are the only things which allow me to pass 
for alive.

MAMMALIAN NUANCES

Leaving mammalian nuances upon the insectoid world is my favorite noontime activity.  
Pink piscine fruit flesh 
reveals itself from beneath 
armored bedclothes of leathery yellow.  

This is enlightenment.  

It takes me hours sometimes to peel a grapefruit 
and I do go all the way.  
After I rouse the sour treasure from 
its reptilian bed, I proceed to remove 
its cotton skin, leaving it to dry into 
a ghost-colored tangled bramble of miniature haunted forest, 
until all I have left are the juice-filled monastic cells I swallow almost as an afterthought.  

All the world peels it with me.  
Flocks of birds huddle in the trees giving advice; 
snakes raise hooded heads from the grass and 
encourage me with sibilant Disney hypnotics; 
rats watch with envy 
from the darkness under giggling flowers 
who all hope to one day attract my attentions with their 
future fructile fetuses.  

Our meeting was fated.  
The grapefruit knew what to expect when we locked eyes 
across the greenery of the grocery store produce section, 
dreaded it, 
craved it in a way, this cruelest of slaveries.  
This is love—desire and fear become one, the 
ultimate unity of emotion.  
The point is not nutrition, 
nor the puckered kiss-shaped lips of a mouth violated with sour.  

This is something you do 
just to do it, an end in itself.  
I would spend my life doing it if I could, 
my gravestone reading E PEELED GRAPEFRUITS 
the way Roman women worked their entire life to earn the immortal memorial 
SHE MADE WOOL.  

They knew what meditation was and this is it.  

I peel myself in a way: feeling the late afternoon breeze brush past my lungs as I labor, taking the honey and sting Bible of this bumblebee world and re-interpreting it with this action, smearing my furry ape inferences all over it.  

It’s the only way I know how to honor it.

THE CEREMONIES BEGIN

The lonely wind caresses 
temporary patterns into the air, gently pressing
me into it with fingers
(to me: incredibly sparse and volcanic fluctuations of heat 
to you: so common and 
tiny you hardly ever think on their existence) How many things 
exist without your thinking about them? I do. 

I miss the ready fellowship of my kind. 
Where I come from, there are 
billions of us and someone very much like you exists because we think about them. 
I am as free as the sky, and I am 
alone. I will enter you 
where you are warmest and wettest—your mouth, your eyes, those strange organs you use to make more of you, those parts of you that feel most like home to you—and I will still be alone, 
but not for long, 
not as long as I remember the rituals we performed back home to honor that home into existence. 

Only the wind hears my promises to myself 
to reinstate those traditions in my new home, in you 
who are heavier and hotter than the air, that I will make the alien familiar. 

I am terrified I’ll forget. 

The ceremonies begin, I remind myself, with a hunt. 
One of us would capture a cell, 
tiny part of you, 
and what we did with it afterward, I cannot tell you: 
I am sworn not to tell anyone not related to me, and my life now depends 
on keeping my promises.