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I live under the wallpaper of the house that no longer belongs to me

There’s a corner where it’s peeling that’s the good spot
Right there I can angle myself to peep out a bit better at the guests

Picking their scabs when they sleep chewing on their flaxen hair fibrous and a digestive aid
I need all the nutrients I can get, grow me big and strong I

Slitherly one time I sat on the husband’s chest till I heard the nightmare brewing
I don’t know why I
Why did I do that?
Whispering get out of my house get out of my house get out my my MY

The child woke up yesterday and came into the kitchen
I was eating butter from the paper (1 slice every second
Night otherwise they’ll notice, they’ll notice) he fainted

Crawlwise spider I back up the fridge—I’m only human
Why shouldn’t I have what they have. I climb back through the ceiling panel

The next day the husband pokes around the attic and I
I
I slidingly down into the walls, hiding amongst the gypsum flakes and mummified rats
“Oh my god, it smells like shit up here! What the fuck”
I hear him toss my bedding about “what the fuck”

Police
Folks in hats
Poking holes in walls
Contractor and a new alarm

Meanwhile I, huddlingly in the corner me

I no longer come out and I’ve become bit by bit
Wall shaped, flat and broad, like a worm or a python
Flexible and muscular. I feed on mouse droppings, spiders, sawdust

Slitheringly slugwise

And one day I’ll be big enough
Strong enough I
While the family dozingly in their beds
Hugging them close fine you may live here bring the
walls in as I part of the house and I and now you and now we,
Friendily we



David is a New Zealand-based writer. Though originally from the rural Waikato, he left to follow his calling and successfully received a grey life working in a public sector cubicle in the capital. Like many new writers out there, he has a lifetime of poems-in-the-margins and first sentences of novels on which to draw. Check out his one other published poem: https://www.takahe.org.nz/skin-in-me/.
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.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
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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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