you offer up a corner 
of your skin for me to gnaw on
		before you bury yourself
		in ambiguity again –
less cat and mouse
more bug in the woodchips, 
devouring		unseen
each of my resources –

i ask you to come with me into the sun and your silence is a resounding ‘no’

it lays its head on its legs and I
can’t help but find it so human as
	its arms
		encircle its wooden knees, wires
	hum hues of green towards its feet
		and up into the metal
		shell of its carapace [...]

grown/programmed (or: biological computing unit)

i will recover in bursts my mother 
will stand by my bedside 
as if i am an ill child home from school
[...]

when i come out as transgender

into the mouth of the spinning clock,
yesterday's grace gone and eaten.
[...]

memory-eater

from when i 
<p>ut the sytax in wrong and i ho</p>e
i can rewrite
the script i work from

the html I am built from is filled with errors

"Algorithms are giant slot machines and success with them depends on factors almost entirely out of our control. Maybe we should just make what we want to make and forget about the algorithms altogether."

algorithmically speaking

rejection is something that artists of any kind are pretty much guaranteed to experience (unless you’re so talented you get accepted every time you submit something which I doubt has happened to even the most prolific of creators)

reframing rejection

you may notice changes in your perception of the senses
when you
touch things they may
            feel different*


selected poems

don't forget me

gender death

bright world

my gender is borne of the natural world

to grow a friend

Sunday Mornings at the River 2022 Spring/Summer Anthology, "Flowers Grow in Graveyards Too"

salem paige

Selected work