Ben Berman Ghan (he/him) is the author of the novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), as well as the collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest books 2019), and the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020). His prose, poetry, and essays have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., The Temz Review and others. He lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at The University of Calgary. You can find him at www.inkstainedwreck.ca.
Bodies
Power to the monsters & kin
who fuck so well we mistake their sounds for
The bodies of rivers clashing
I was told being human is to bend
all desires to concrete timelines.
I watched you bend
only towards the joy of envisioning a body
that could be for you a home.
Remind me, when was the last time our bodies were our own?
Vibrance
I write myself in vibrant mushrooms that blossom language.
a dead space in remaining virtuously—
virtually the archive of rot all my own.
Here on the other side of
being dead there is no
“other” or
“side”
only infinite variety of matter becoming—
Animal Earth.
Machine.
If anyone can yearn for a becoming that never ends
It is me in the cacophony of my stillness.
Rosi said: “the governance of life contains that of extinction.”
lovely
it might be to orient oneself there: a universe of rest,
resting
spilling from the leaky
skeletons of writers.
We too are laid bare upon that autopsy table of prose,
Picked apart by governing bodies
Of human beaks.
Art is an animal that fucks without cause.
From us, it may spill
Increasingly monstrous beings.
luminous, perhaps, in changing.
An animal that yearns to
love for itself
And itself, be loved
To yet find itself in gentler futures
a haunting yet to come.
Invader
You said your body is a
river
and the shoreline is the end
you showed me how
to use my fingers on
grief shaped conclaves
thighs—
Slowly, slowly, forefingers stretched
Meeting, entering, feeling tides
Relinquishing, listening, in—
When you cry out,
this time it’s me,
For hands, not my hands,
held first
And I know you’ve come
to me from the other side of
water
to whisper
no, it is not for you, Dear invader
it’s for me.
World
Rosy language
holds me, shapes me,
teeth sing siren songs to claim me:
a creature of
hurt.
Between towers, an animal has crying
teeth venom-less, yet no less sharp
Political orders beg I come for them,
demanding sovereignty from pale flesh,
kissing smoke up my thighs, seeking in
to a darksome place.
In the hollows of my stomach they bite deep.
Hungry, happy fangs that claim
He is mine, or no ones.
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