Archives, Featured, Poetry + Short Stories
Published on April 22, 2022

Egg

written by Morgan Green
The box could hold a hundred pill but holds one. Encased in a dome of plastic, suspended stiff by stifling cardboard. Like a cheap crystal ball that says no, baby. no baby. I should have asked you to walk with me. asking is important. This pill is featherlight, made of hormones and grace, but I am heavy with history and you are still asleep. I want to love you in my own tongue but the only alternative is the jelly you can grasp. I should have asked lung-tongued, asked asking. Ask any despot: if you must die, the only freedom is control. Ask any ovum in its broth. Ask me can I choose another choice. Make me make a mantra of hate that is not love. You balked at the price of plan b and made me want you more and more of you. Why not I thought the pill works a few days. Sometimes when I sleep next to someone I imagine us a closed system. I dream I am the iron envy of iron enbies. That night we had such fun once you forgave me for that thing you did. Ask the knife of life and it will flicker. Ask the ovum in its skin: it did not choose division. Ask any pillar of society and it will divulge its wish to lean. Secretly it leans leaning. Ask the ovum in its cluster: it did not choose obscurity. Brainless and stainless, it did not. I am big et small, it says in the way that it says nothing

Featured image: A grayscale bedroom, light streaming in from the window. To the right is a pharmacy window. Transparent before the bed is a large cardboard egg carton. Illustration by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

The poem reads: The box could hold a hundred pills but holds one. Encased in a dome of plastic, suspended stiff by stifling cardboard. Like a cheap crystal ball that says no, baby. no baby. I should have asked you to walk with me. asking is important. This pill is featherlight, made of hormones and grace, but I am heavy with history and you are still asleep. I want to love you in my own tongue but the only alternative is the jelly you can grasp. I should have ask lung-tongued, asked asking. Ask any despot: if you must die, the only freedom is control. Ask any ovum in its broth. Ask me can I choose another choice. Make me make a mantra of hate that is not love. You balked at the price of plan b and made me want you more and more of you. Why not I thought the pill works a few days. Sometimes when I sleep next to someone I imagine us a closed system. I dream I am the iron envy of iron enbies. That night we had such fun once you forgave me for that thing you did. Ask the knife of life and it will flicker. Ask the ovum in its skin: it did not choose division. Ask any pillar of society and it will divulge its wish to lean. Secretly it leans leaning. Ask the ovum in its cluster: it did not choose obscurity. Brainless and stainless, it did not. I am big et small, it says in the way that it says nothing.

Morgan Green is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and engineer. Their work explores the rich ironies in tech and text, which they imagine as nested systems animated by suppressed queerness. Green’s work occupies public institutions, including the Special Collections at Amherst College and the Riverside Public Library. She teaches creative computation at the University of Illinois, Chicago.