Getting Electric Literature straight to your inbox is always a good thing, but nothing has so totally shaken me out of the stupor of the ordinary working day quite like this story from Emrys Donaldson. Their story is nearly impossible to categorise. The best I can do is that it is a primal scream of frustration from ancient/futuristic crustaceans, turning an oceanographic lexicon into a unique study of consciousness, place, balance and ecosystemic connectedness. By turns surreal and moving, it’s shatteringly good. 

We are the three-hundred-year-old heckin big bois of the sea, grown larger than any of our kind has ever been before, covered in carapaces made of titanium custom-molded to our bodies, the embodied dreams of our elders who gradually decayed until they collapsed into fleshy heaps on the floor of the sea, fortified with the language we developed to sustain us, suited up in our cyborg flesh probably able to live forever, placed here in the time where we have a fighting chance at taking over the rest of this water planet, kind among our kind, moulting with the assistance of bigboi doctors and bigboi scientists, investigating the future-focused potentialities of telomerase manipulation, well-armored against enemies of any size, and we did not come to play.

Published in Electric Literature, Nov 9, 2020 – Issue No 141, You can read it here