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the sky

doesn’t know her reasons

 

little does it matter the transition

how high the fingerprints

who offers who seeks

little does it matter the prediction

 

the immediate future

is keen:

 

the knights no longer

can be counted

 

yesterday

I read the sky

primitive questions within

the black smoke infested

my bones

and I strive to know

holding onto utopias

 

for how long will

the ligaments last if

in this city

nobody flees

 

everyone expects for the time

 

he comes in uniform in decrees

busts and statues and also comes

when all is clear

for we live under

eviction

 

visions fall

as threatened

and the sky

doesn’t know her reasons

 

but I

I reached the border

of every word:

where everything binds lone

every definition

spreads

 

yesterday

I gathered the letters

with constellated rebellions

 

I sew on my fist

a dark tempest

 

and the sky gazed back

answering

 

this way

who knows



Jarid Arraes was born in Juazeiro de Norte, in the Cariri region of Ceará, in 1991. Writer, cordelista, and poet, she is the author of Redemoinho em dia quente (Whirlwind on a Torrid Day), Um buraco com meu nome (A Hole that Carries My Name), As lendas de Dandara (Legends of Dandara), and Heroínas Negras Brasileiras (Black Brazilian Heroines). Curator of the literary imprint Ferina, she currently lives in São Paulo, where she founded the Clube da Escrita Para Mulheres (Writing Club for Women). She has published over seventy chapbooks.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
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As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
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Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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