Bruising is terraforming.
Your fingerprints bloom tiger orchids across my calves.
Flesh yields flowers, because flesh is weak and supple,
like all good soil must be, to bear blunt force
and bounce back blue.
Blue was never your color, so you find ways around it,
fingernails perfect shovels: they slide inwards, drawing borders,
staking claim over free land.
Gouge mountainpaths across metacarpals,
deposit deltas between the sternum and muscle,
make indents of history in the soft tissue
and the sure breaking of a rib.
Land must be bent, must be burnt,
must be rammed, and tamed,
so I close my eyes, learn every breath and gesture,
which one is a prelude to your bulldozer hands,
what is the signal to the noise from above.
I must admit it’s terrifying, the variation,
because you are often flutterwing breathing,
running on my skin, all tender, still
shaping, just as you are thunder.
Scars are still rivers, stark white reminders,
as if lightning too wanted to only flow,
not be trapped in amber.
Sometimes I wonder, if your rage is just revving up,
if your fist will now fit my empty chest cavity.
There was once sweetgrass and wildflowers there,
fireflies, swallows, and voles too. Before you, I was wild land,
no purpose or plan. Rain was only rain.
I leaned toward sunshine without a scheme.
And after you, after metal claws, and poison gases
Killing steel raking against bone, sky blooming
death mushrooms,
I will rewild too.
Rukman Ragas writes about earnest contradictions and temporary obsessions. A Tamil writer of speculative fiction from Sri Lanka, Rukman’s work has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Deadlands, khoreo, the Baltimore Review, and others. They completed Clarion West 2025. When not wrangling his novel into shape, Rukman can be found consuming an unhealthy amount of historical media or playing DnD.