Mike Piero, Ph.D. (he/him) is a bisexual writer and professor in Northeast Ohio, where he teaches courses in writing, literature, the humanities, and game studies at Cuyahoga Community College. He is author of Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice: Playing on the Threshold (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and co-editor of Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (McFarland, 2021), and his creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Impost, Midway Journal, Moveable Type, and The River. He is currently working on a gaming-themed novel (Rogue Burnout) and a poetry chapbook of Midwestern sacrilege. He can be reached at www.mikepiero.org.
for Wark and Wittgenstein I have come to recognize my own long lost bodies hidden away from reach especially my feminine selves, wholly incomplete and abandoned but strong resilient and almost ready to play all the lost levels of public parity and pleasure always unsure though forever mourning the what ifs? and but whats? the fear of contempt and aversion,… Read more →
Slowly, they tell me, my dark-bark worries grow umbrella-like not unlike dragon blood trees that shade the elephantine deserts of my insecurities. Calm, calm—then: flames climb up wooden ivory towers in a flash, intensely, and then all burnt out. After the ashes smolder, and the forest of my sensoria turns to dragon blood tears, bodies labor motionless for hours, sometimes… Read more →