- After Nour Mobarak
We wipe away
The
Delicate [murmur]ations
Clinging to skins and low
Hanging sleeves that force
them into the long
DRIP-DRIP-DRIP-DRIP
Journey of
Worms
And reds.
But
the click
And the tick and the
Hum
Of lovely lucid anger finds
A way back up to make the
DRIP-DRIP-DRIP
Pages out of anklets and thigh
And hip and—
Listen
Very close. You can hear
Them past the midnight
Mass and
Massacre: the steady rhythm
Of a
DRIP-DRIP
And question
Singing and ringing
All around our ear
Are we hungry?
[I]
No.
I am dead.
[we are]
[it is]
Going
along and on into great mouths
In a steady
DRIP
Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), as well as Behold the Dead (Anstruther Press 2025), Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020), and What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest books 2019) His second collection of fiction, The Library Cosmic, is forthcoming with Buckrider Books for spring 2026. His prose, poetry, and criticism have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan, and The Ancillary Review of Books, and has been reprinted in such anthologies as Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. His work has won the Foreword INDIES Award for Science Fiction, and longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, Ben is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where he lives with his partner and two cats. Find him at inkstainedwreck.ca
