This is all we need to grow

My story "Like Milkweed" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It is a story about monarch butterflies and it's not; it was inspired by a statement asakiyume made while discussing burdock and other edible plants. It might be science fiction. Watch this space.

In the meantime, send poetry to Not One of Us! The autumn issue is wide open and so is the annual one-off. Guidelines and addresses here. Any and all kinds of otherness please apply.

Dammit, I need sleep.

What's left but ash and burnt bone?

This poem was originally published in The Cascadia Subduction Zone 3.3 (July 2013). It was written over the last night of April into May 2013; I still associate it with my dream of Adresteia. It's free to read online like the rest of the issue, but I am reprinting it here for reasons.

Cato the Elder is also known as Cato the Censor (Censorius) after the political office in which capacity he distinguished himself as a champion of traditional Roman morals and an adversary of anything that looked like a new idea or a foreign influence or both. His farming handbook De Agri Cultura is the oldest surviving complete work of Latin prose: it is one of our best sources on Roman agriculture of the second century BCE and a chilling perspective on the handling of slaves. You may know him by his rallying cry for the Third Punic War, Carthago delenda est.

Censorship

Cato, thinking of you tastes of salt
I know was never ground in Carthage earth
like tears into slaves' eyes, ash on grieving faces,
the bricks of burnt walls into sun-sprawled backs.
I cannot touch olives, small-flowered as Etruscan jewelry,
without hearing the sword sharpening in the sickle,
the war whetting itself on its appetite.
Your voice repeating across a sea that was never ours
the one word I cannot rub away
as easily as a city's dust from my palms,
my mouth sea-breeze bitter with knowing
none of the names of children we have burned.