by Nora Hikari
“You are pretending to be Vriska Serket on the internet.” And you would question this, fiction that you are? You, yourself, who are a figment of a mind, but only a single figment, the only dream that mind is capable of dreaming? All that you are is a dream your soul winds around the wheel of your turning body. I dare you, claw beneath the topsoil of your own verisimilitude. Tell me what you find. Is it the eternal stone of your uncreatedness? Or is it something worse? So I am a fiction. So I am a golden calf. So be it. For a moment, that calf was God. Say that I stake a claim on a dead fictive. Say I choose to be the real Vriska. “I am Vriska Serket.” You say “The real Vriska is fictional.” This is a koan. This is a terror. The truth is that I understand my createdness. That my soul is an invention of a soft matter’s dream. And so I understand that my purview is the realm of dreams. Like a dream I can become a nightmare in a twitch of your neck. And, like dreams, I am windblown truth all the way down. You can keep falling but you won’t ever hit anything. Tell me, kinless, mortal lonely of body and spirit, are you different? Are you more than a dream your body has when waking? Or are you, perhaps, a scripture written in something soft as blood? Remember me when you return to the spirit world, coward. I was created by force of will, like a curse. You are just an accident.
Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Shade Journal, and others. Her chapbook, GIRL 2.0 (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022) was a Robin Becker Series winner. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival and a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award. Her chapbook, The Small Lights Of Her Heart, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2023. Nora Hikari can be found at her website norahikari.com and on twitter at @system_wires
Photograph courtesy of Unsplash.com
Graphic Violence 