Episodic by Natalie Wee

The game begins: choose your own
adventure. Your character: girl wandering

through a myriad of back alleys &
hungry eyes. Your outfits, variations of

the same impracticality. & you the Aryan
ideal, blue-eyed and pale as milk.

Your body all meat & meal. Your bones,
dead weight in a moving cemetery.

Being wanted is the key to
being important enough to

keep alive. Speech options a test: Are You
a Bad Girl Who Needs Punishment?

Isn’t shame such a strange thing. How
it is given to you, an unwanted gift,

folding itself into the house of your body
as if it paid the rent. The journey: a wonder

of molding yourself into the perfect
possession. It always ends the same way,

with you pinned under someone’s body
like a butterfly crushed by a wheel. How

you chose your name knowing
there was no writing your own ending.

Natalie Wee’s book, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines, will be published by Words Dance publishing in 2016. She is currently an Associate Fiction Editor at Broken Pencil Magazine, as well as a Cultural Studies & Critical Theory MA Candidate at McMaster University. You may find a complete list of her publications at her website, http://wondersmith.co.vu.

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Excerpt from “FORECASTING THE FUTURE” by Gillian Devereux How To Seduce Your Boss: Perverse Instructions From the Girl Who Smiles Too Much by April Ranger Two poems by Alyssa Mazzarella America the Beautiful by Kendra Tanacea