EXODUS OKTAVIA BROWNLOW
Nothin’ But a Couple of T-Shirt Eaters
I
Plated piles of it.
The other kind of white meat shredded down to look like the realer kind of white meat that would totally keep us full, but we are more worried about totally keeping ourselves empty.
II
Together, we’ve finished-off entire wardrobes. Hers’ and mine. Tell our parents that it’s just the style, now when they express concerns over our tattered and torn clothes.
We blame it on the rayon-munching moths, ravenous underneath the closet-bulb’s watt’ed-rays.
‘On them being too old to understand that it’s not back in their day, anymore.
That it is our days that we must fashion from.
That to be less of something, today, is to be worth more of something, tomorrow.
III
Plated piles of it.
When I bite down on a tear, it wears down even further into a melted mush.
And when I want to ask.
And when I wish to ask.
And when I begin to think, to wish, to want, to ask through the brief breaking of my cumulous hunger cloud—The real food thing…just this one time?
She says, will you pass me the tomato sauce?
Dips a squirming strip into it.
Spins it—spoon and fork—to slurp the silk noodle up.
See…? You can hardly tell the difference.
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Ms native. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing. Exodus has been published or has forthcoming work with Electric Lit, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, F(r)iction and more. She has been nominated for Best of The Net, Best MicroFiction, Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize. Her piece “Chicken-Girls and Chicken-Ladies and All the Possibility of Pillowcases” will be included in Best MicroFiction 2022. Her piece “The Terrible Darling” is featured as a Wigleaf Top 50 2022 selection. Her debut fiction chapbook—”Look at All The Little Hurts of These Newly-Broken Lives and The Bittersweet, Sweet and Bitter Loves”—is set for publication with Ethel Zine and Press in Spring of 2023. Her debut collection of essays–“I’m Afraid That I Know Too Much About Myself Now, To Go Back To Who I Knew Before, And Oh Lord, Who Will I Be After I’ve Known All That I Can?”–is set for publication with ELJ Editions in Summer of 2023. You can visit her website at exodusoktaviabrownlow.com.