living while starving
Issue 18
2025
Emi Harris
there is something following you something pink something that moves like silk and slides like water something that leaves roses drowning in its shadow and trees burning the sky burning your ribcage fingertips blazing and you hate fire but it warms you it softens you into melting sugar and butter pure joy essence dripping curling the tips of your hair and your toes and then you feel its breath on your neck and you’re running.
there is something following me something red something that seeps through my walls and soaks my carpets and hides under my bed with long fingers curling over the sides wrapping tendrils around my thighs something cold and heavy that weighs my body like the ugliest, stubbiest rock you’ve ever seen and i stare at my ceiling feeling hollow and thinking of death and the taste of burnt sugar lingers on my lips something inside me clawing itself out.
but i swallow. and i swallow. and i swallow.
black holes exist to consume, not to destroy but to fill the void of their body, a singular body that can pulse and release and swallow, a body that craves blindly, an existence of pure desire of a hunger so insatiable it’s banned in several countries. blacklisted from heaven for being too heavenly, the fruit of a liquid sweeter than nectar, an ambrosia that heals nothing more than a night of silk twilight, the lace hiding everything but the shape of a body moving like water, of a mouth that waters for a taste of something more, something behind closed eyes, the pink and red of veins, the slick shine of a cannibal’s saliva when they see their meal, a feast of dead limbs, the delight or no life, no warm flesh, just the cold refresh of sliding skin, in out, in out, circling like the unwound sins of unholy women, freedom in the wings of the mourning doves, of clouds slowly dissipating, of a black hole unsatisfied with tiny suburban towns, of a black hole that exists to consume alone
Emi Harris (she/her) is a senior publishing & editing and creative writing double major with a film studies minor at Susquehanna University. On campus, she is the head design editor for Essay Magazine, the secretary for FUSE, and an editorial assistant for SU Press. Off campus, she works as an intern for Penguin Random House and finds home in Doylestown, PA. In her (limited) free time, she lives in a different century, watching Méliès films and listening to music on vinyl or cassette. Her writing also appears in RiverCraft and Essay Magazine.