A person with dark curly hair and red sweatshirt gazes up from their laptop. — Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey

Assistant Editor Andy Sia: Callooh! Callay! For “Posthuman Slays the Jabberwock” has come, swinging its vorpal blade at the very construct of narrative and language. In Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey’s retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, the slaying of the Jabberwock is called into question—the piece’s capricious rhythms give way to a searing indictment of human culpability in ecological devastation.

Posthuman Slays the Jabberwock

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And ho, the beast which calls itself human comes cribbling down the meadow, blade blooded with victory. If beast kills beast kills beast in this great give-and-get, who claims the creaking crown? If human-beast kills every other beast, is that vast swath of dead still fit for poetry? The Jabberwock had a dittering daughter, you know—as they made a killing floor of her forest-father, Posthuman saw her seven snicker-snack eyes shining between the pine trees. How sharp the needles, the knife, the jaws that bite, the claws that cut all apart, so what does the story look like now? If Posthuman scrubs their sword back into mirror-metal, if they pose for a photograph looking like the second coming of the Grim Reaper, if the photo runs on page six of the local paper with a paragraph about their frabjous triumph printed in 8-point Times New Roman, what does the story look like now? But then, what if Posthuman—once the brillig unblues from the sky, once dusk erases us all down to the crepuscular—what if they find themselves searching the dark for the drifting daughter’s eyes, their feet flitter-crittering with echoing minds of their own, walking down a familiar path filigreed with roots, a quest not for glory but salvation, their mouth its own animal carving from the air I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry? Then ’tis brillig again, and the slithy toves and the borogroves are typed onto the end of an unfurling list of endangered species, and in the aching light of a never-living day, Posthuman wanders the wabe and can’t remember what they’re looking for, not the mimsy, not the wind, not the moment when the forest itself declares them its enemy.

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Portland, Oregon. In their writing, they hope to explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in publications such as The Adroit Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Gone Lawn. They can be found on X/Instagram @esmepromise.