Your eyes are the soil around a depressed white root.

Nematodes will eat you out of the bathroom mirror

when you feel quiet and laboured and you want less

nights. Work a fingertip into the dirt and tell me,

what is alive? And you know it is everything. Even you.

Just as there is always a river and a bridge and an undercurrent,

there’s also always a pristine and private hope like a friend

asking you to stay here a while longer, because

the world without you in it is the world without you in it.

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a Canadian-born Jamaican-Saltwater Geechee writer, editor and filmmaker. She grew up in Wales and lives in London. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Magma, The White Review and the Guardian, among others. Her non-fiction has appeared in An Open Door and Welsh (Plural). Her debut pamphlet Kaleido will be published by Bad Betty Press in autumn 2022.