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Welcome to Our Home

I live in a haunted house. By which I mean I live inside your throat. By which I mean I’ve grown so used to this haunted place that it has become unhaunted. I greet the ghosts. The ghosts are my friends.

You said you wished to press me into your chest, all the way, make an endoparasitoid of me. You said it over tomato sandwiches glopped with mayo and shining with salt.

But I didn’t want to be a caged bird in your center, so I nested in your throat.            

When you yell, I feel it here, here, and here.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. Her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, The Journal, and Fugue.

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