The lovers in shadow, or Noticings from alchemy attempt #44

Your Name now sounds mangled in their mouth / Your Name used to sit at the back of their throat, for comfort and the acoustics / You now speak in wildflowers whom change as the seasons do / that give the soles of your feet new, supple textures along your path / Your voice will be rasped for some time / to say i love you to anyone, even yourself, would be a curse if said in haste / You are no longer the sweetener to any origin stories of their smiles or laughter / The air, now cleared, untangles the certain ache of intuition in your gut / Your palms are now white hot to the touch / You now know the putrid / taste of harm was not malevolent in nature, only curdled / for it was hope gone / rancid / residual tacks snagged in your stomach lining caused ulcers - the result of your cunning ignored and calcified / Hope can be found seeded, between the petals that cushioned your footfall / to love is to practice blood magic / even when the wounds were unintentional

Mariah M, or Em, (they/them) is a non-binary Black queer writer, cultureworker, and abolitionist based in Greensboro, North Carolina. They are presently a 2024 Mellon Community Fellow with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab and a Winter Roots.Wounds.Words. Fellow in Speculative Fiction. They are the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Beautiful Project (c. 2023), a two-year Watering Hole fellow (c. 2017, 2019) and an Emergent Poet Fellow with Crescendo Literary (c. 2017). Em moves with the knowing that their identity as an artist is inseparable from their role in community. As an aspiring anarchist & practicing abolitionist, they write to challenge, escape & build the world we live in. 

Mariah is a founding member of SaltWater Sojourn, a Blackqueer-autonomous anarchic artist collective based in the South whose members believe in the transformative power art can have on the individual and the collective, as well as the Co-Visionary Architect of Revival of the Seers, a summer rest retreat for Black queer cultural organizers and artists rooted in North Carolina. They are the former Creative Director at the Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause (c. 2019 - 2024), a storytelling platform centering the lived experiences of Black folk born with uteruses, and stewarded the launch of Hippolyta’s Journal as part of NC BLOC’s Protect Black Freedoms fellowship. You can find Em chatting with trees about Black radical possibility, indoors dancing under red lights and on Substack at Selfish Mars Musings. They have poems published by the Neighbor News Pan-African News Service of Oakland & voicemail poems.

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