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from Jobs for Magical People (That Do Not Involve the Military)

 

Magic involves (involutes) memory
one doesn’t (exactly) forget (everything is saved)
it’s akin to state-specific recall—
people remember, it’s (just) stored someplace
else.

Magical diaries were invented
for this (very) reason; yet even with
a diary there’s the moment where one
needs to open it (carefully flip the pages)
and peruse the entries. The action, the
reach and pull (book off shelf, out of
drawer, from notes saved into a
document file).

Hence, your task—to gently point out
you haven’t actually done this yet (only
meant to), or the results of this divination
might be useful to compare to the notes
you took on February 9 (I think), or

when did you last ward this place
(you know) if you forget, that might be
because someone is trying to leverage
this slippery trait of memory to—

we’re not fighting anyone here, (but) we’re
keeping ourselves safe.

If I don’t remember mine (and you don’t
remember yours), maybe together we can be
more than two separately (more than
one together) and

build something (a palace
of mind) jointly—thought by thought.



Bogi Takács (they/them or e/em) started working on the poetry / flash fiction series “Jobs for Magical People (That Do Not Involve the Military)” in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. E would like to ask you to consider how authoritarian power manifests the world over (including in the stories we tell), then do something to counteract it. Bogi is a writer, poet, critic and scholar of speculative literature; and also a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the US, a winner of the Hugo and Lambda awards, and a finalist for other awards like the Ignyte and the Locus. Eir second short story collection Power to Yield and Other Stories was published earlier in 2024 by Broken Eye Books, and eir poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting is available from Aqueduct.
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