after “After” by Emily Pittinos
My mother is not my mother because she is not her own. She belongs to thrown pots and the maggots crawling down my spine, to chewed nails and unwashed hair. Everything she touches rots and blossoms with larvae and caterpillars. She is of the night and juxtaposing the places our minds wander with the riptide. I am combining what lasts of the furniture with the puddles of water left from wherever we last left things and waiting. Watching for the sky to shift as I realize none of us were exactly human.
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Kaydance Rice (she/her) is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan and currently attending Interlochen Arts Academy. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Ice Lolly Review, voicemail poems, Cargoes, and Élan Magazine. Kaydance is also a prose editor for Surging Tide Magazine and staff contributor for The Lunar Journal. In her free time, Kaydance enjoys playing the viola, rambling about existentialism, and spending time with her plants.