I’m a writer, editor, educator, and witch1 living in Moh’kins’tis (colon-ly known as Calgary). Er. Colonially. You know what I mean.

My first chapbook of poetry, this dying body, was released in July 2022 with Rahila’s Ghost Press, and I’m currently an MA student in English at the University of Calgary pursuing a creative thesis on trans ancestry and folklore.

My writing has been published in Plenitude MagazineThis Side of WestNonBinary Review, Briarpatch Magazine, and a few other places. I have a short story in Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color, and I wrote a chapter of Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture with Nora Samaran. I also edit with Room magazine, and have mentored trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit youth through the Gender Generations Project.

Artistic rendering of Serena Lukas Bhandar, a smiling woman with brown hair and olive skin, wearing a flowery scarf
  1. Yes, I’m a practicing witch! No, I do not eat children! Okbye.

Category: Portfolio

  • The Heart Always Knows

    Certain places in this city I cannot visit anymore. The block of Yates my ex-boyfriend’s apartment overlooks. The bus stop where he laid hands on me. The entrances to three favourite restaurants, sites of various arguments while smoke curled from his lips. I cannot walk past them. My body simply does not allow it. I’ve…

  • The Root of Echoes

    The Root of Echoes

    Few questions in the English language can truly end the world as you know it. “Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing the answer—unsure if he even wanted to know. “Is that your son?” they gasped, as their forks and knives fell from their hands to the table and floor. “Where is he?” she…

  • Scheherazadenfreude

    Scheherazadenfreude

    If she had parked closer, she would have seen that the front door, wood dull and damp, hung half-open, swung inward as if on some slant. Sarah had parked around the bend at the bottom of the gravel driveway, her view of the house blocked by the trunks of two Douglas firs. She couldn’t see…

  • Into the Black Hole

    Into the Black Hole

    In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the event horizon is the region in space around a black hole—the “point of no return” beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull, not even light. If you were to watch someone fall into a black hole, as they crossed the event horizon their body would seem to…

  • I love my hair / I hate my hair

    I love my hair / I hate my hair

    My hair has always been coarse—sand and salt and pine needles bound into black keratinous strands. It sprouts and surfaces, growing not just from my scalp, but everywhere I have skin. My hair has always been with me. Even in my earliest years it was there, a seed waiting for spring, a line of chemical…