“Stickerbrush Symphony” interests me mainly as a narrative device. Beautiful as the song is on its own, it works on my heart as part of a story. Or, more aptly, two stories: the story of DKC2 and the story of childhood.

I wanted to pick Pokédex entries that felt resonant, and in most cases, pokémon that I had an emotional attachment to. I didn’t have any criteria that bound me to the first generation—if anything, I wanted to resist the part of the fandom that idealizes the early games/show and dismisses what’s come after.

I want to make my own
karaben (character) bento,
buy the freshest strawberries
cutting them into hearts
then sprinkling on the sugar.

Kaboom my chokehole and I will sing for you.
That is, I am out of caps and need help limping.

When the sun spit its light over the mountains I had only climbed down from a few days earlier, I kicked to life a fire I did not make and ignored the slow music of the world to which each of us dance before departing.

So much is defined by the shape of our pain.
The scar on my arm where my thumb rubbed through layer after layer of skin.

I learned his patterns, parried his bombs,
got all up in his face, all up in his guts.
If I kept him running, he could never fire.

There are caves here, too: little subterranean veins washed in lamplight. It’s a nice place to get lost & stay lost. Starlight falls through cracks like spiders burning & nothing hurts like it once did.

My favorite apocalypse
happens halfway through
as in, everything comes down
and you’ve got to keep going

After he left, everything became slanted. The towns the cities, the forests the valleys. The entire earth diagonal.

He never went to school or changed clothes because he was too busy mastering Atari, weighed down by secret histories no book could ever contain.