journey through the afterworld
A poem about an escape and the re-emergence into a new and unknown place
Katrina Lemaire is a poet and fiction writer based in Toronto. Inspired by gothic literature and the uncanny, their work often focuses on experimenting with narrative form and sound technique. You can find their works featured in Sad Girl Diaries, Plenitude Magazine, QueerScifi Magazine, and Beyond Words Magazine, among others.
don’t pick at the paint crusted behind your lids, flecks of stardust smattering in electric sparks across the smoke of your skin almost on fire the sky is a frothing eddy of cerulean a haze of purpling morn bruising slow and swollen; like the belly of a robin. the road lifts up — peeled back, spine-raised across an anti-gravitational strip we drive down, down past crimson dunes lumped together hides bumping, the rind of rotten fruit molding in my hand as we take the next exit. Music — no, electric wires cross whirring telling us to turn back don’t turn back our bones of before are buffering buckling as we aim for lightspeed we follow the burn of new stars across a jetstream of nebulas prisms refracting in shimmering shards of multicolour at the end of the road bursts of fauna and botanical wisps of starblooms and sun lilies bend in welcome home we stare at each other, the moons, the earth, the infinite, and smile.
This is so lovely 🩷