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 […]
Untitled, by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy Keep Reading »
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
Sometimes You Get the Bear, by Tim Pratt Keep Reading »
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
Ask a Necromancer, by Amanda Downum Keep Reading »
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
This Candid Field, by Mat Joiner Keep Reading »
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,
Immolatus, by Lyndsie Manusos Keep Reading »
“I tend to refer to most of it as the territory of Ghost Soil. It certainly isn’t a narrow genre. Whatever you call it, it should dance away from easy definition. […] [F]or me, part of it was a knowing that given the way the national narrative was going, this vital space was going to
All the Trees That Have Perished Alongside My Childhood, by Bogi Takács Keep Reading »
The scarred man sits on the water fountain ledge with his back turned to me. His hair, long and straight, spills down his back. His hand grips the side of the ledge, and he peers into the dark water without speaking. They say everyone sees something different reflected in those waters. “What do you see?”
The Shadowed Undertows, by Natalia Theodoridou Keep Reading »