Mildred Barya

Photo courtesy of Todd Crawford NER staff reader Meera Vijayann speaks with author Mildred Kiconco Barya about cultural mythologies, the masks we wear to deny our humanity, and her essay “Poetics of Transmutation” from issue 44.3. Meera Vijayann: In your essay “Poetics of Transmutation,” you use an encounter with an eastern rat snake to unravel the cultural mythologies you were taught around the animals. Why was this subject important to you?

Mildred Kiconco Barya is a Ugandan poet and prose writer who is teaching at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The Animals of My Earth School is her fourth collection of poems, recently published by Terrapin Books. Read more by Mildred Kiconco Barya July 28, 2023 6:00 AM

A bearded stranger puts a crystal ball into my hands. There’s a chick inside, a few days to hatching. Its skinny body is diaphanous white and moves— muscles, tissues, organs—a faint, beating heart inside a thin membrane of amniotic fluid. I squeeze the ball lightly and my heart skips a beat. Cluck-cluck. I close my eyes and see the image of Lot’s wife, eyes petrified.