Hometown, ghetto, Auschwitz, Los Angeles, the whole megillah.They sent a wonderful kid to get me and Gigi on the tape.This girl says we’re amazing, not just Gigi and me, all the survivors,the Holocaust survivors. I really want to help her. I’m reading then a book, PT Barnum: America’s Biggest Showman.PT Barnum had Siamese twins, Chang …
They call it hipster heaven, where all the cool kids go. I walk the dark street alone, searching for the entrance, but no one I pull aside will give me any details. None of them look me in the eye. They shake their heads, shuffle their thrifted boots, and tell me no in a way …
Tell me when she dies, he says.Tell me when the prisoner breathes her last.I will scream her name from the rooftops andspray-paint her likeness on every wall;light a candle in her honor,engrave her parting words onto every front page.I will be her architectand rebuild a dust-streaked life from the broken temple of her past— beam by …
Stand here and become a treeSift the loam with your toesTalk to the birds in your branching mindStand here and leave eternityDrab concern of mayfly humansHold the skies in your fingers outstretchedTalk to insects, sing the day,Sing morning with feathered familiars, sing night asBats cry, as owls wing, intentStand here and face everywhereBecome a world …
I met the bear hunter the night my mother died. I was a hospice care worker myself, though not in the facility where my mother spent her last months—I couldn’t have borne that. I knew some of the doctors and staff at her hospice, though, and professional courtesies meant my mother was taken care of …
The Indignities of Death We begin life confronted with all manner of indignities and inconveniences: diapers, pants, shoes, etc. The list just gets longer and longer as we age. I hate to break it to you, dear reader, but death does not free us from these aggravations. One of the very first questions anyone ever …
In the first spring I hide from the plague in a pale rain above Schet-cheet-qua-chub,fading into the timber at the end of the world.I owed that hill something, even before it hid me,and I think it took it.łaska khalakwati-stik, łaska t’uɁan,they are older and harder than meand they can take damn near anything(except chainsaws) casting …
The Danse Macabre—the Dance of Death—is an iconographic theme that first appears in fifteenth-century European art. It shows skeletons or cadavers leading a procession of the living from all walks of life towards the grave. From the modern perspective, this may seem gruesome, even morbid. Most images of (Western) death are banned in the …
Danse Macabre: Equality in Death in Medieval Istrian Frescoes, by Jelena Dunato Keep Reading »
In this time of masks I can touch only land,open the green book where warm feet wrotelines of desire. I need stranger maps now.I will comb the ghost-tilth with my hands,wake the past from its red-clay bed. I go shoeless between dead and quick,mazing blood-spoor, pressing skin-warmed coinsinto the earth until the birds hush and …
We learned as each of us came into being that all castles have hearts. This castle has three. We still have our hearts, but our bodies were taken. Our hearts are the flames alight in the candles. They are the curtains and stained glass windows. They are the stains beneath our breasts, cold and withering, …
