Hello World

Hello World Ashley Laughlin (bio) I don't know how many more times I can say helloto another body, one of inevitable dust burst andsoaked into steaming mud, washed beneath sidewalk tilesI make myself into a steak dinner and show, hide the filthon my face, rise from the gutters and clean behind the earsI wonder if I'm boring, wonder if I hold your wanderingattentions, wonder into vast, choking silences Now and then, or often, I've wondered if I'm in love,as if I know what that is anymore, with this little heart'sendless thumping in its little ribcage, still living, stillthere, I slide back into the sewers with the rainwaterto stare into the black as I await the coming flood I don't know how much longer I can last, witnessingthese last bits of my humanity stripped from me andcommodified, myself as a profile, my soul as a stat,and all of us looking away as we strike the matchof our own self-destruction, wait to be told whichinhuman shape to make out of our ashes to fitthe mold that grows on our relationships, ourselves I know you haven't forgotten about me under here,you, watching as the candle burns away to nothingI would chew through my own flesh to be free, andI do, though it gets me nowhere but down to the uglycore of myself, already claimed by flickering neon anddrought, the great wasteland earth after the collapse End Page 121 Ashley Laughlin Ashley Laughlin is an emerging, neurodivergent writer with two fiction pieces in Literally Stories. Originally from East Tennessee, she currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Chulalongkorn University and a translator. Copyright © 2024 Pleiades and Pleiades Press