Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash
by Haley Bossé
When she was eight, Alice Henderson briefly held the world record for filling her mouth with marbles. When she was nine, she bit the moon. By ten, the museum curators reconsidered their invitation to explore gravity, density, and volume with each of the senses but, by then, it was too late.
The boy formerly known as Alice Henderson went on to the taste the subway, his tongue a trail from Strathmore road to station. He tried oak chips, the stain of elderberries on wet fabric, the boy next door in Apartment B.
He found he never loved anything like the moon, its styrofoam craters cradled in paint, its surface slowly giving way to more, each tooth mark popping toward its final form, crackling softly as it rose.
Haley Bossé (they/them) is a queer, non-binary writer and artist from the Pacific Northwest. Their poems can be found in the Columbia Journal, the voidspace_ zine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Find them on Bluesky at @TalkingHyphae.bsky.social
