Two Poems
Parasite & Supernovae
by Maud Acheampong
Parasite
Supernovae
After Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
I am waterlogged by the stickiness of August,
all her past summers dripping off my white
tshirt. The air is wild and frivolous and the
Sun is mid-burst — my face a blood-river.
Swollen purple clot of wine on my lips,
nails dug into the golden afternoon of my
Youth, its last sunset, I look at the horizon
drenched in honey and drift toward it.
Brave and afraid, I metamorphose into
a bowl of warm blackberries, a treacle
jam, prickly with salt and history.
Here at last, drinking in the sun.
Maud Acheampong (they/them) is a Ghanaian-American Poet and New Media Performance artist interested in soft technologies like misery, ugliness, nostalgia and the way they manifest in our digital ecologies – for better or worse. Through Dainty Funk, their digital avatar and drag persona, Maud takes on monstrous forms and attempts to chronicle these assumed human phenomena with a digital lens. What does it mean for our bodies, our time, our pasts, to be so incredibly digitized? What of those archaic social constructs that bear no weight in the digital world? Or too much weight? Dainty Funk is that moment of connectivity – between beauty and beast, art and science, technology and feeling.