Conversation with My Sister

By Devon Rae

I don’t have one, but sometimes I feel her shadow pass obliquely over mine. It feels taboo to name her, so I don’t. There’s so much I wish to tell her. About our parents, for example, the our large inside my mouth. But she has no ears, so I say nothing. If she were here instead of that other place, I wonder who or where I would be. My coordinates charted by her absence. 

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Conversation with My Breath

By Devon Rae

Cut short after my flu vaccine, feeling fleeing my face and my hands, my skin turning red, the pharmacist standing over me with the EpiPen, armed to strike, and I think, if this is how you leave me, I suppose I can’t complain, I had brunch that morning with my partner and my oldest friend, I shopped for stationary and lingerie with my girlfriend all afternoon, we made out in every changing room, then I wrote poems for hours, and if that isn’t a good day to die – but then my throat opened, and I was so grateful, the way you can only be when something precious and unmerited departs and then returns – and the paramedics cared for me, and my partner picked me up and kissed me endlessly and brought me home and gave me sushi as the pale light bled out of the sky.

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Conversation with My Body as It Disappears

By Devon Rae

​Your entire life is a vanishing act. You disappear from one place, then the next, leaving fingerprints and dust. Your voice is carried off by the ocean or the wind. One day, you try to sing, but hear no music, only breath. You gaze into the mirror, and you are nowhere to be found. Your eyes like stars burnt out.

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​Devon Rae is a queer writer from Montreal, QC who now lives in Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, PRISM International, Room, Plenitude, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Thirteen Conversations with My Body (Anstruther Press, 2024).