#poen

— The Sleeper, Edgar Allan Poe

The spoon cracks the cherry’s crimson dome—

a tiny pop, like a button undone.

Below it, hot fudge runs slow avalanches

down vanilla cliffs, still breathing frost.

First bite: the shock.

Cold and molten kissing on my tongue,

a sin that doesn’t ask permission.

Sugar floods the nerves I thought were only

wired for midnight and tangled sheets.

I close my eyes. The world narrows

to the way whipped cream collapses,

how the glass sweats like skin,

how the nut shards catch between teeth—

little, wanted hurts.

Is this almost as much?

The shiver up the spine says yes.

The way I linger, scraping the last fudge

from the bottom, unwilling to let it end—

that’s familiar too.

No whispered names here, no aftermath,

just a sticky spoon and a cherry stem

tied in memory.

I lean back, undone, satisfied,

and laugh at how a dessert

can be this indecent,

and how indecent can taste like this.

When I die, bury me with moss

bury me with leaves and put me in the ground with the glass shards of my silent heart

Don't burn my corpse and turn me to diamond

don't trap my soul in a prison of polished wood

My life was not what I meant it to be and I couldn't regret a word or action even still

and even still

fill my body with seeds and snails

let flowers grow from my misguided soil made of rotting flesh and forgotten wishes and let them unfold

The canyons painted with my skin welcome rivers of slime and foul-scented liquid

Let me be beautiful in all the ways I could never achieve in my live state

and let a forest grow from my corpse

When I die, let my heart and soul keep growing

let it keep breathing

let it keep beating it's phantom song

"Thump, thump, thump,"

My heart still says

it is silent still

it makes no vibration in the air which travels through your ears and is interpreted into what we know as sound, but it is still there all the same

I could not live this life as it is, I cannot as it was but I can now,

filled with the cacophony of home and all who live here

the forests of now weep and mourn for what is told to them, but maybe

it will be okay.

So leave me be in a shallow grave

I will feel the warm embrace of soil and the comforting and wonderful touch and kiss of roots, worms, and fungi

Allow the sun showers and storms to wash your face of tears for something I did not fear and revel in my newfound wonders

by Jihaad Ayoyemi “K!LLYEMI” Malik

Twenty-seven years,

and one by one,

they disappears—

some recur, a flicker,

a five-minute appears,

then fade before the finale.

A few stayed for the opening credits,

others vanished after the cold open.

Some got spin-offs

canceled by life’s poor ratings—

unforeseen,

but not unexpected.