In One of the Episodes…
I’m standing somewhere between
fallen kingdoms and fading kin.
A woman with broken teeth like cowrie shells
presses a bouquet of wild violets into my palm,
their petals purple as mourning cloth.
Her body is tired from carrying the weight of years.
I’ve adorned her tired flesh in gold dust and garnet.
She screens with dead eyes, aching for a fire she’ll never feel.
A scroll she holds in her arms opens its mouth and screams a diet of doctrine:
Lose all the weight with First Corinthians.
Then she gathers my skin in her hands, like the hem of a garment,
and kisses the stretch marks on it.
Above us, vultures circle in religious syntax,
their wings spelling the scriptures.
Her dying body waltzes with mine in the dusk.
Her lashes beat like wings against my cheek.
I ask, Can you deliver me?
She answers with her mouth against mine:
Only if the chrysalis of faith births wings stronger than your flesh.
Dust-Concealed Sanctuary
One man sits at the edge of the closet’s darkness,
and tastes the drip of light
through the slats.
One man borrows a suit and bowtie
from someone else’s dream wedding.
Notes from someone else’s vows.
Mouths a thousand kisses
to the man who always
leaves his house at dawn.
One man imagines
the hollow of his throat as constellated.
He traces his collarbones
like they’re escape maps.
When he swallows,
he feels the moon slideshow
through his chest.
One man wears his identity
like a second skin,
threads a silver key through his ribs,
turns it
until the lock clicks
behind his eyes.
One man watches his peers
make planes from feathers and firewood.
All he can do
is pick up the left-over wings
they tear off,
and store them
in his lungs.
One man curls inside the closet’s silence,
his bones like tulips,
soft with waiting.
He tells himself rain will fall soon.
He will bloom gently.
One man feels like a story stitched wrong.
He says he loved him once,
across a thousand dreams,
maybe more,
maybe in the wrong timeline.
One man chews on the corners of missing,
swallows what’s left of desire
sharpened into shape.
He makes himself full
with hunger.
Doreen Masika is a writer, filmmaker, and poet planted in Kilifi, Kenya and cultivated at Daystar University. Her work spans various platforms, including Isele Magazine, Culture Africa, The Kalahari Review, Qwani, and elsewhere. She also co-wrote the psychological thriller Run Mary Run (2023) and lives in Nairobi with her cat, Zaza. Follow the journey on Instagram: @masika.__
Cover photo credit: Evan Velez Saxer