One dark morning, due to a tragic hamster-related experiment gone wrong, the world ended. These are an extract of the collected poems, stories and fragments of the few survivors of those dark times. CWs for animal death, death and a minor suicide reference

The hamsters don’t kill you, of course.

They don’t need to. You do the hard part

for them. All they have to do is whisper

in your ears. They start narrating the story

of your life, beginning, of course, with

your traumatic childhood. They rarely get

past the age of ten before the effects

take hold. I don’t know if it’s because

what they say is so terrible, or because

you’re scared to hear the ending.

a) There’s a hamster in the house. He lives under the sofa and eats our cereal. The hamster is the spectre of Communism in Europe. He looks at us and says, is this all you’ve got? He’s reading this book right now and wondering if this is a useful form of art. The hamster has tiny eyes and he is always hungry.

b) We’re setting traps for the hamster but he’s too clever. He dodges them like a swimmer dodging the rocks and he does not like peanut butter. I open my hand to try and catch him and he tells me I need to do more, try harder. You do not win a revolution with peanut butter or humane traps. You need violence.

c) Maybe we did trap the hamster. Maybe it’s dead, rotting in the walls. Maybe it never existed in the first place, a collective imagining of what might have been, of the eyes on our every movement which have been there since 1917 or 2017 or the future. It’s the cop that lives inside us all, my inner landlord, my scab. It squeaks and I long to crush it beneath my bare feet.

d) Will we mourn something so small? Something we only saw fleeting glances of in the dark. Something we only knew by the traces of what there wasn’t—the cracks in the wall, the holes in the bread. Will we cry for an absence which is all we’ve ever known, and will that finally count as politics?

no one tells you about

the longing how it makes

your knees buckle your

stomach twist your heart

clench like a fist, the longing

to be with him, the longing

to become him, the

longing to please your

mother and the longing

to not, the longing to live

but the fear of doing

it alone, the longing

to see the world as it

once was, the longing

to sleep in your childhood

bedroom, the longing to

live in the before and not

the after, the longing to be

your old self and the

longing to be your new self

and the longing for

the world to be a video-tape

you can rewind

and the longing for

the world to be a video-tape

you can tape over

and the longing for the

fucking hamsters to die

already and the longing

to cradle them to

your chest and tell them

you’re so, so sorry.

something a little different today. hope you enjoy this one. don’t forget to feed your hamsters <3