First Grade

“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Crow Dancer


I’ll give you the whole story.

I had spent three weeks upon a thrice-damned ship. Don’t ask me why I did it; for now we’ll say only that it was necessary. Don’t ask me why I chose a ship when I’m afraid of drowning.

I rode a fisher vessel to the nearest village with a port. Hid out a whole day, knowing how damn close I was to being captured. I bought passage on seven ships under seven different names—and then I slipped away on one of the few vessels that I hadn’t paid for.

You could say that I’m wanted.

I go by Aryin now. I am a necromancer. I am of the most skilled of those within my trade, and I am fleeing for my life within my enemy country, to escape a decree from mine that will kill me if I am found alive.

Though secretly sometimes, though none must ever know it, I am still Navyra of Yoshai.



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