Manitoba’s skull is an overpopulated snake pit. The endless hissing and the endless movement make categorization impossible. Anything she knows, or is disposed to know, is incestuous, perverted, codependent, and without a birthplace. Memories of weddings mix with facts about volcanoes and the colour yellow often gets in the way of the number eight. There is no difference between her father’s voice and the shaking legs of an unloved dog, nor is there a difference between the French language and the way sand dunes form. Some years ago, Manitoba pointed at the sky during recess and told her classmates that it was a very hungry caterpillar. No one knew what “it” was. Later, then, or eventually, Manitoba was asked to solve a math problem, and so, on the chalkboard, she conjugated voir in imparfait. There was laughter – the cruel sort of ego-staining laughter that can only be created in the chest cavities of children. But Manitoba couldn’t hear the mockery over her confusion – the slipping, wet, hissy crackling of venom was like television static. How could she dislike the sound of snakes but love television? Was there a way to make television static the tenor and snakes the vehicle of her mind, inside of her context? At nine years old, Manitoba had bruises under her eyes from pressing her thenars into her eye sockets too hard. She complained that there were too many snakes, of course, there were never any snakes. When Manitoba learned about mould in science class, the essence of rot got tangled up with the pressure points targeted in hugs, so she avoided touch. That. The notion of decay wove itself into her biology and after that she could no longer accept that she was an organic thing, a prone-to-decomposition thing. Manitoba once thought that her teacher’s earrings (fleshy pink, plastic studs) looked like nipples. The reminder of her own made Manitoba cry so hard from discomfort that she vomited and was sent to the nurse’s office. The nurse told Manitoba to dry her tears and not to fret because lots of children have overactive imaginations, dear.

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Inuya Schultz is a writer and performer from Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She is the director of the Encore Poetry Project, a polyphonic performance series. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Yolk Literary, NewLit Mag, the forthcoming issue of RedNoise Collective and elsewhere. She was the featured poet for Accent Open Mic's 71st volume and holds an Honours English Literature and Creative Writing degree from Concordia University.