She Says She's Going to 'Bunker Down'
Ares J. Benoit
like she's a building, an institution that cannot slip but moves blocky, brick by painful brick, in the centimeters, a school swallowing the smoker’s corner at a rate of one sidewalk tile per year. The cool kids see her coming and chuckle at her slowness. They puff death at her facade, crushing stubbies on her walls with yellow-stained fingers, jangling change in black jean pockets before settling perfect melodies onto their ears as they re-enter her hallways. Let them laugh, she's busy gobbling up another ant, another yellow yard line; she's going places slowly. She burrows into the weight of time, feeling stronger by the decade. In seventy years, she'll be at the school's fence line, and those teens will be using walkers. She can practically taste the chain link, metallic and stretching out her skin, searing bricks hot and sunbaked from summer. The memories of those leering kids, sooty and pain-stacked photographs, faded and nearly forgotten in her momentum. She's only getting started; she's going to make it to the intersection; she's aiming beyond the school district. She's got places to go, and forever to get there.
BIO
Neurodivergent, queer, and living with chronic illness/disability, Ares J. Benoit (they/any) lives in Calgary / Mohkίnstsis / Kootsisáw with their family, but inside they still feel like a young forest demon discovering poetry for the first time. Micro memoir at Five Minutes Lit; poetry at Plenitude and forthcoming from M E N A C E.
WHY I WRITE
I inherited a legacy of silence. Every time I write, it is to find truths and better shape my life around them. A joy, a privilege, a responsibility, a way of living: I orient myself to expose beauty and pain, loss and longing, and so discover who I am in the world.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Bluesky: @aresjb