after @notaleptic
In my headphones the translator,
voice cracking, trying to make friends
with a local fish. They’re militant here,
and of course I understand — if they
hadn’t taken charge this place would
be a waste dump. This fish is a moderate.
“There are things we can’t do,” they say,
“limited cooperation must come eventually,
just because you breathe air doesn’t
make you our ancestral enemy.” It helps
that my kind eat mineral based. no questions
about caviar or competition for resources,
though I do want to taste the lava. I hear
it’s superb here. The fish hears the vegetation
at home is amazing but the pH doesn’t
balance. I promise to send for some, knowing
it won’t make it here the same, but they
won’t know the difference. I try to remember
that just because the whisker faced fish
have eaten people it’s not their preference,
and my kind are hard to digest. I wonder
what it is like to have a body that’s liquid,
if you travel less in straight lines or think
more easily around corners. “I like you,”
says the fish, happy with its salad from
the underwater herbs of my planet.
“you could help us make a lasting peace,
I think.” I hope so. The fish don’t need
the ores in their landmass, but they
will fight and win in any terrain to keep
the water pure. We are held in some
regard as peacekeepers, being hard
to kill and harder to dissuade. Blockheads,
they say, but it works for us to be steady
and implacable. You can’t fool the mosses
on our skins with selective testing: the water
is clean, or not, and we can enforce terms
better than anything made of flesh. If
this succeeds, I will see the fish again,
its teeth and shining gills, for the treaty,
and bring rare plants, take delicate silicates
in return, feast with my friend as all
friends do, to victory and a peace that
will not erode where water meets land.
| Elizabeth R. McClellan is a white disabled gender/queer neurospicy demisexual lesbian poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chickasha Yaki land in what settlers call the Mid-South. In kan other life, ka is a domestic and sexual violence attorney. Ka is a previous winner of the Naked Girls Reading Literary Honors Award, a 2023 Rhysling Award finalist, and recipient of the Judi Neri Scholarship for Disabled Poets. Kan work has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction, The Future Fire, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Apex Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Chrome Baby, Apparition Lit, and others, including Salt, Sand, Blood: An Anthology of Sea Horror and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mother: Tales of Love and Terror anthology. Work from kan is forthcoming in Small Wonders, There Used to Be a House Here and the Utopia Science Fiction Best of Utopia anthology. Kan can be found on Twitter and Bluesky as @popelizbet, on Substack at popelizbet.substack.com, and on Patreon at patreon.com/ermcclellan. |  |