Kathryn Allan

AURA/GRAPHIC EVIDENCE

Listen to the audio version.

I remember orange, yellow, and red,
being lit up,
neurons firing fireworks,
primary and primitive.

Now anxious thoughts go tippy-tap
down blood slick pathways.

I’m full of the grainy silt of undreamt dreams
collected in the corner of a blackened eye.

I practice white smiles
to beam light into the grey.
Strangers say take Echinacea,
exercise, meditate,
strip my skin from the bone.

A crescendo of chronic pain
bruises my world plum purple.
I ride indigo waves through
a forest green high, and wonder
if my spirit still spits flame.

Kathryn Allan is editor of Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, co-editor (with Djibril al-Ayad) of Accessing the Future (a disability-themed speculative fiction anthology), and the inaugural recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship. Her scholarly and creative writing can be found in such diverse places as Letters to Tiptree, The WisCon Chronicles, Wordgathering, and Strange Horizons. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.