Honey in the End Times
From my face hundreds of petals
bloom, unfolding until
my stamen is revealed:
a yellow tongue beckoning for bees.
I exhale fragrance. Pollinators
dive into the sweet nectar of my saliva,
crawling down my throat to
fill my trachea with a pussywillow
purr-like buzzing.
I am skunk cabbage corpse flower.
Beetles burrow into my skin
before whispering to my mycelial wake.
Blind, I creep cracked concrete,
repopulating cities.
Colony collapse endemic
until I end it all. Living
beetles wasps butterflies bats moths fill me.
So too their ghosts.
I am a horrible hive of haunted honey.
People flee my halo of swarms.
I am queen of queens,
hybrid of insect and human,
chimerical, vengeful goddess of the pyrocene.
Sidewalks shatter beneath me.
Buildings shudder above,
collapsing in sharp, crumbling rubble.
First come dandelions.
Then daisies and cottonwoods.
More and more flowers and trees
erupt in my wake until
the sky is golden with fire and pollen.
Raspberry Elegy
The raspberry canes grew jungle-
thick and my sister and I carved
tunnels through the prickles,
red juice running from overripe
berries like the blood
from our scratched-up limbs.
So many berries that we even had some left over for jam
after filling our bellies and ruining our suppers.
The scabby old canes were the best.
They bore the most fruit.
Hidden deep in the thorny thicket,
a barbed-wire fence no grown-up would ever dare cross.
Until they did.
My sister and I wept.
Tractors rumbled like tanks,
grinding treasure into chewed-up tracks.
They would have poisoned the land, too.
Sprayed weed-killer, as though raspberries are weeds,
all to plant Christmas trees
to be murdered each December.
Dad told them that weed killer would poison our spring.
Poison our ponies.
Poison us.
And so the land lay fallow,
rebirthing itself with
goldenrod,
timothy,
wild oats,
daisies,
red clover.
The next year, ponies
grazed a newborn pasture.
Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag and elder goth who was raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid all over Canada. She’s a graduate of The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University, the Novel Immersive for LGBTQ+ Writers at GrubStreet, and she double-majored in English and Classics at the University of New Brunswick. She’s held residencies with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Roots. Wounds. Words., IMPACT Festival, CAROUSEL Magazine, and Femme Folks Fest. She is a Pushcart nominee, Aurora finalist, and 2024 Brave New Weird winner. Her writing appears in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, On Spec, Strange Horizons, SolarPunk, as well as in numerous anthologies. She’s been a barn mucker, belly dancer, comic/game shop manager, aerialist, woods worker, industrial/goth DJ, professional naked lady, and coffee slinger. If she ever grows up, she wants to be a space marine and/or a storm chaser. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. You can find her on BlueSky, Mastodon, or at her writing blog, Nudity is Only Skin-Deep.