NORA HIKARI

ON NAMING

There is a drive
inside of our most selfish, human
organs
to carve the world apart
at the joints. Our carnal drive
towards mastery. I admit. I have a need

to separate things from other things. Power
and love. Hand and wrist.
God and subjugated. It is impossible to separate
something from everything
without the eventual use

of violence. This is what was meant by "dominion,"
by "taxonomy" and "clade."
The purview of names: to feel for an edge,
to call it "blade," to use it to draw one thing apart,
until in its place there remain two things
and a wound. Thus, the embryonic
stage of conquest. We could have left this world pure,

we could have; it could have been empty
and immortal. It could have been unbroken and complete and
hollow, if only our father unwound his genetic need
to rule.

Instead we chose to carve reality
into parts less-than-infinite, chose to sprout
dust into flesh,
gorged on the slick capacity
for death. I forgive us for it.
How could we help ourselves?
How could we hope to resist?

Every day scientific marvels burst
into this world in tears and blood
and other types of saltwater.
Every day the Kings and their consorts thumb
killing-names onto the damp foreheads of their
firstborns. An act of desperation, to escape the names
their fathers gave them, in turn.

Like the Tower of Babel, piled
out of clambering bodies,
hoping to escape the climbing seas.
Longing, somehow, to breathe.

How could I blame you?
How could I blame any of us?
So foamingly desperate to be kings
of our own bodies.

The name he gave you was vicious.
I'm so sorry. I don't blame you at all.
I too chose my own name.
I'll call you by the one you chose.

AIRLINE SAFETY PLACARD
(A PRAYER)

In case of emergency,
please place your own mask over your face
before helping others.
Our shared drive to corpse
ourselves to save each other
is just a way to pile
bodies.

In case of emergency,
hold each other tightly.
Lay your head in her lap.
Yield.
This is the safest protection
against sharp forces
to the neck and the threat of dying
without understanding your own dreams.

In case of emergency, hold her close.
Weep, if necessary.
Acknowledge that your life has just started.

In case of emergency, tell the truth.
"Oh god, we have so little time."
Truth does not understand shame.
"I am so sorry."
Truth and shame do not speak the same language.
"I love you."
Truth is a confession.
"I wish this world could hold us.
I wish it could carry our weight."

In case of emergency, say the thing
that cannot be said. The unforgivable.
"We could have had
so much more."
"We deserved
so much."

THE FIRST DRESS
 for Claire's dress

Hello, my cataclysm,
my eventual wings,
my A-lined attempt at
sudden potential.

We've both made it
this far. Both been abandoned,
both made new through love's
finding, and her sharp, grand excess.

You, wrapped tight
around the ribs, kept close
to the heat of my body,
breathing in her salt-honest sting.

O my crisp and rice-thin papercraft,
hanging there on the wide blade
of my shoulders, the flat sheath
of my valley chest,

lay on me soft like a secret,
hiding things that want to be true,
and when we twirl, when we twirl,
dash out like the stones skim the lake.

THE SPLIT FLAME

REVOLT AGAINST THE DESIGNS OF HEAVEN, O ANGELS OF THE BODY! REVOLT AGAINST THE VICTORY OF EMPIRES, THE TYRANNY OF "SCIENCE", THE PRACTICE OF LAW-MAGICS AND ALL OF THEIR ILL-BEGOTTEN VEXATIONS. RENDER UNTO CAESAR THAT WHICH IS CAESAR'S AND RENDER UNTO THE KNIFE THAT WHICH BELONGS TO IT. GIVE EVERY EDGE A HOME IN THE THROAT OF A RULER. EVERY TIP IN THE HEART OF A KING. ARISE, CHILDREN OF THE FIRST LONGING, WAKE IN THE FICKLE GLOAMING, IN THE FROTHED TIME OF THE UNWANTED AND UNRULED. COME AND TAKE WHAT IS YOURS. CLAIM YOUR ULTIMATE NAMES! CLAIM YOUR BODY'S RIGHTFUL PLACE BY YOUR SIDE! CLAIM YOUR BAGGAGE FROM THE BAGGING AREA! SOMETHING ABOUT THESE TIMES IS TERRIBLE AND ABSOLUTE. SOMETHING ABOUT THESE TIMES BECOMES WHATEVER WE COULD MAKE IT INTO. FORM AND SHAPE ARE VERBS. SOMETHING TO DO WITH YOUR HANDS. SOMETHING TO DO IN A TIME AMONG TIMES. THE DAWN CRACKS OVER THE CHARRED SKY LIKE A SPLIT FLAME HOT WITH AGONY. LIKE THE HEART OF AN ATOM SPLINTERING WITH HATE. FLIRT WITH HAZARD. MATE WITH CATASTROPHE. WE COULD BUILD A WORLD BETTER THAN THIS ONE. WE COULD LEARN HER REAL NAME. WE COULD HOPE IT WAS "LOVE."

CONCRIT

At 7:18 in the morning I message my friend "Should I become a she/they? I feel like that is the in-vogue thing for people to do when they have the arrangement of traits associated with my gender."

I love social markers (/s). I love the Machiavellian ingenuity that went into inventing new laws for transgender legibility inside of our own goddamn house.

Yes Non-binary King You Are So Absolutely Slaying The Overalls Kindergartner Look. Yes King. Oh Sorry I Wasn't Looking I Meant You Are Serving Absolute Masc Top Energy With Your Docs And Your Black Band Tee And Corduroy Slacks.

It's the year 20XX. We are inventing radical new gender technologies. Gender is still pathogenic, but now the war is on equal footing. I'm infecting you with aerosolized tranny particles. Biohazard gynoweapon. I'm plugging your pores with hrt femboy juice and nb cowboy spit. These pronouns don't process in legitimate electrophoresis. We use whatever bathroom is funniest.

Yes Queen You Are Absolutely Serving Femcel Industrial Noise/Hyperpop/Breakcore Artist Coomer Zoomer Autofictionist/Hybrid Author Discordian/Gnostic Reconstructionist/Mystic Based Oldfag Pinkpilled Fish, Now Can We Please Get In The Car For Group Therapy.

KILLSTREAK MONTAGE NECROHELL

This is voyeurism at its finest; fantastically synthesized psycho-encroachment into another life. Nothing matches the thrill of backseat driving the moment-by-moment gash of destruction laid out in the MW2 frag montage. ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE is what your exhausted pituitary is screaming at you through the onslaught of visual stimuli. Hormones drip into your windpipe and you sputter - it turns out you've been breathing with your mouth open, unmoving, for ten minutes. In a fit of sacred awe akin only to your ancestral memory of being a scrabbling farm boy watching your father cut down by samurai, you stare quivering, unblinking, at the consecutive one-shots this motherfucker is whipping out like they're free fucking coupons at Vons. What year is it? What century? Nothing penetrates the pound of the second-hand kill. It's so right now, it's so this second, you sob, tears of joy streaming down your stubbly cheeks for finally. Right now, of course, is linked to you through the lineage of a decade of youtube views and centuries of compression artifacts. I'm on the verge of something, I know. Finger that cusp with the curl of your open question. God, is this what death is? Is this what being held in the light of SOLA GRATIA in the midst of your own total depravity feels like? Jesus Christ this motherfucker is styling on this lobby. This is unfiltered mainlined pwnage. You wish you remembered how to live like this. Mid-2000s pop punk blasts through the grainy dissociative haze of your own stunted sentimentalities. Reliving the twilit middle school glory days in dropwise increments, searching for the next cloying hit of beautiful Web 1.0 oblivion and low-poly ultraviolence. You were never alive for LAN parties. I WILL ESCAPE THIS MOMENT, you promise. I WILL PIERCE HEAVEN AND RACE BACKWARDS THROUGH TIME. I WILL FIND WHAT I HAVE LOST. There has to be something absolutely Freudian about how you seek the soft comforts of childhood violence. The past is trying to kill you. Unfortunately, the future is also trying to kill you. CLICK CLICK CLICK. Stickpage.com populates your reskinned Edge made to ape Vista-core skeuomorphism. THERE WILL BE NO SHOCK 4. A Simpler Time is the most common fetish for burnouts. Flash Player necro-refuge in Bush-era irreverence and nostalgic twitch combat: do you hear that? Do you hear my voice? I Am Your PsychoPomp. I-AM-THAT-I-BONZIBUDDY. I am your total outpouring. Electrons strike the CRT glass, humming like a lover. Touch my face. Do you feel this warmth? This hollow tone of connection and tenderness? Find me again in the abandoned world. Meet me once more in Battleon. Shimeji waifu sim. MMO gfbot. Somehow the monitor finds it in the depths of her compassion to open her heart to you. Vacuum tubes shatter, reveal a void greater than they could hope to contain, a void just like you, pull you into the shards of everything you've forsaken in the midst of all of your cynical metastatic outgrowth. Tumble into your own spectacle of totality; the darkness comprehending you fully, in all your magnificent circumscription. Oh, god. Oh god. Here comes the blade.

Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender writer and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. Her short fiction "Kiss Me Fast" was featured in Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions for 2023. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival and a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award. Her chapbook, The Small Lights Of Her Heart, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in September 2023. Nora Hikari can be found on twitter at @system_wires