Benjamin Rigby
Benjamin Rigby
Benjamin Rigby is a poet and fiction writer from Fresno, California whose work explores impermanence, paranoia, nostalgia, and the collapse of memory. His writing moves between surrealism and stark reality, focusing on what erodes, what lingers, and what refuses to be named. In his free time he enjoys reading niche speculative fiction, watching video essays, discovering new music, and spending time with his family.
His work has appeared in Words With Weight, The San Joaquin Review, and is forthcoming in Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets.
The Moths Have Learned To Read, Anyway
The escalator chews through a man’s leg,
and no one stops to watch.
His femur juts from the metal steps, sheen of a subway rail.
A child tugs at her mother’s sleeve, points,
but the mother hushes her,
drops a coin into the vending machine,
and buys a pack of gum.
The man is still screaming when I step over him.
(Transfer Station: Bleedthrough)
A girl with my sister’s face hands me a Ziploc bag
stuffed with yellowing lamplight.
"It’s expired," she says. "But it'll keep the moths away."
I swallow it whole.
My ribs glow like cracks in a reactor core—
for a moment, I am holy.
Then the cops arrive,
batons buzzing in their hands like wasps caught in a jar.
The light curdles in my gut.
I cough up something winged and writhing—
it tastes like Sunday school from 2010
and the inside of a 1995 Ford Taurus.
(The Lantern: Shaver Lake, 4 A.M.)
My father once told me:
Moths don’t love the light.
They just don’t know how to want anything else.
At the lake, the lantern hums in the dark,
its wick drowning in kerosene.
A hundred moths hurl themselves at the glass,
but the light bends them wrong—
turns their wings to ash before they touch the flame,
leaves them twitching in the dirt,
half-burned and unsaved.
Dad’s gone. The truck bed is still warm where he was,
but the static on the radio has started talking,
sputtering out something that sounds like my name,
but isn’t.
Somewhere beneath us, fish circle in the dark,
chewing on old hooks, misnaming themselves,
repeating words that haven’t meant anything in years.
(The Motel: Tulare, California)
A lighter clicks in the next room over.
Then again. Then again.
I hold my breath. It stops.
I exhale. It starts again.
I press my ear to the wall. A voice unspools, slow and stuttering,
like a cassette tape warping in the heat.
Something about a debt,
something about a gun,
something about how motel mirrors don’t tell the truth—
only what you’re ready to hear.
I turn to the mirror above the dresser.
My reflection blinks too late.
Then, not at all.
My keys sit heavy in my pocket. I slide them out,
turn them over in my palm. They are mine. They have always been mine.
So why don’t they match the lock?
Outside, the moths throw themselves against the neon VACANCY sign.
The light gutters—just for a second—
and when it flickers back, half the letters are gone.
"CAN Y"
I do not ask what it wants to know.
The man in the next room flicks his lighter again.
This time, I don’t breathe.
(Last Stop: Home)
Mom kneads dough at the kitchen counter,
her hands crumbling into moth dust.
Dad’s on the roof, hammering protest signs to the chimney.
The wood is rotting, the nails sink too easy.
The sign used to say something important.
Now, the rain has eaten half the letters.
"THE ESCALATOR STILL HUNGRY.
STAY AHEAD OF ITS TEETH."
The radio crackles.
It’s my sister’s voice, or something like it,
but the words drag, overlap, misfire.
"Did you—did you—did you bring—"
I open my mouth.
Moths spill out—
a confession, an offering, a swarm.
They cling to the ceiling,
wings dusting the plaster,
writing their own gospel in the dust:
"WE WERE NEVER THE FLAME, ONLY THE THINGS THAT BURN."
Mom laughs, sharp as a struck flint.
"Let them come," she says.
"We’ve been rehearsing for this since the day you were born."