The Glass Squid (Strange Pilgrims, June 2026)
On Deliverance (substack: Shark’s Parlor, August 2024)
From Birdstrike (The Belfast Review, Issue 4, July 2025)
My body absorbs the post-sunrise beach like a lost cog clicking back into its beloved black-oiled wheel. The sand, as it transforms from sea floor to open terrestria, gleams like a frozen plain.
The low tide smell of ancient rot is appetising and horrible. Appetising not to the mouth palate but to the subtle inner palate which rests in the mouth of the subtle body and hungers for tastes by which to remember itself.
It smells of my own sea body, old, rotting, unused to oxygen. It smells of becoming landed: a half-breathed breath, gravity resistance, memory of where I used to live, before the blunder where we came up here, fully onto land, and mistook novelty for freedom.
A plane roars above and, as it rides, a seagull crosses. The two make a near-perfect X. I address the seagull, again: do you, bird, remember a time without planes?
From Sauna
Published as All the Women Now in Feminine Complexity: The Unlikeable Female Protagonist (Violet Zadoyan, ed.), 2025.
In my heart, gender is empty space. At best, it’s as meaningful as a chocolate bar, a pair of jeans, a dish of curry—looks pretty, tastes good, fits well, might make me feel better on a lonely night.
But I’d happily forget about gender and instead consider: the way layers of variegated blue overlap a rocky coast, or the way a palm of hand feels against my own warm calf, or how all proteins vital to earthly life were recently discovered on an asteroid, or how some animals live so deep in the sea they eat the heat which gushes from our planet’s centre, or indeed how ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unexplored because it’s so deep you’d kill the life down there simply by shining a torch.
Everything in this world—even this tiny world, ours, the one we’re eating up and spitting out and boiling to death for our sins—is actually so irreducibly strange and multifarious, it makes me cry.
In the sauna, among the beads of sweat on my face (the sauna was, to the hotel’s credit, very hot indeed) were also tears, just a few but true tears, to honour the vastness of our world, the magnificence of its variety, and its danger. (Yes, I was on my period, go on, blame the blood if you like, it’s used to blame.)
I wondered: should I be in the sauna on my period? Am I violating some prohibition? Ridiculous. A holdover thought from the old times, an echo of banishment.
And when confronted with tearful, religious amazement at life’s bursting complexity, was I then supposed to spend time, even a few minutes of my limited time alive in the world, thinking ah yes I am one of two genders, which one is it and what will I do about it, oh do let me consider? How absurd. I had to laugh, and I did laugh a little, quietly and self-consciously, from my woman’s corner of the sauna.
Marianne Daigh 