I’m the child you locked in.
Every afternoon and every Saturday morning. The child you said was fat, whose food you took away, who served you dessert but wasn’t allowed to lick the spoon.
I was that too-blonde, too-good, girl who was too afraid to touch Down There. Using allowance on 10 candy bars at a time, I’m the girl who got high.
Eating them one after another in a dim room, a sunny after-school afternoon, chocolate high. I never learned to vomit.
Rachael Z. Ikins, excerpt from ‘I Am the Woman’, Darker Objects
“Sometimes a reading is just a reading, an anthology just a collection of poems and stories. On rare occasions the chemistry between contributors and features is magical and something really special happens that leaves all participants warmed by the memory long after. Dark Objects leaves warm embers as we face the darkening time of year.”
-Rachael Ikins
Rachael Z. Ikins followed her pen into the forest as a child. As with Gretel in the Grimm Brothers’ tale, a wicked witch forced her to reroute through valleys so dark she doubted the existence of the sun at times. A fabulous wizard held her heart in his hand. They fell in love. He urged her to release poetry from her soul. She lost everything before she finally understood her truth: write like a motherfucker, write or die. For poetry was the constant through all storms, the beloved she refused to relinquish. She won some prizes, published in journals and then books. When last seen, Ikins was feeding pickled jalapeños to a large dragon perched on the roof of her house—a dragon who bestowed her name upon Ikins’s cat. Sister souls of fire and passion.
Indie Blu(e) Publishing 