Ocean’s twelfth therapist isn’t fully licensed in the state of Maine. Her office is an RV parked behind the Hannaford, from which she also sells crystals, blueberry jam, and sex. Her advice is erratic and mystic, largely unhelpful, but Ocean doesn’t mind. She doesn’t want to be helped. A therapist is, in her estimation, a …
Nothing says Puerto Rican funeral more than milky coffee, hot chocolate, bread, cheese, and stale pastries. Francisco Oller perfectly captured a snapshot of Puerto Rico in El Velorio, but Oller never painted the afterlife. He’d settled on the living and their celebration. Partying in La Placita captured the essence of life in my island, except …
When you arrive in the Afterlife, you eat and you drink. Pomegranate seeds, the arils like edible jewels, sweet and tart and bitter, garnet beads that burst as you chew. Fungi you know—Porcini; Portobello; Oyster; Straw—and some you don’t—violet Amethyst Deceivers and nubby Dead Man’s Toes—the taste of the things they’ve fed from, the things …
I died in a tropical rain forest, protesting the logging industry. I didn’t want to die, but I was prepared for it. I had left a will, I had talked to my family about the risks, I had meditated and read the right sorts of books. I had many thoughts about the afterlife. None of …
(avec mes remerciements à Jacques Prévert) Winter is sitting on a bench. She is not noticed by the people passing, the children playing, the birds flying from one tree to another. She is ignored, as though she is no more worthy of note than a man with glasses in a gray suit. She seethes with …
L’hiver est assis sur un banc, by Margaret Dunlap Keep Reading »
On a Tuesday afternoon, I was sifted into a terracotta urn hand-painted by my mother. I watched her from the center shelf above the sink, dipping her coarse brush into acrylics called sunshine and tangerine, and wondered if she’d ever known my favorite color was turquoise. I had never been a candle until right then, …
There is a man on the porch. There is man standing on the porch in the dark, in the rain, with no umbrella. The man does not have an umbrella and he is standing on the porch in the rain but he is not wet. It has been raining for hours. Around his feet, on …
A 2021 Finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award From the Thirty Years’ War, sung as a lullaby to orphans: Maikäfer flieg!Der Vater ist im Krieg,Die Mutter ist im Pulverland,Pulverland ist abgebrannt.Maikäfer flieg… Fly, ladybug, fly!Your father went away,Your mother died in the pulver’ed lands,Those pulver’ed lands have burned to ash.Fly, ladybug, fly… Chiron in …
From the Ashes Flew the Ladybug, by Alexandra Seidel Keep Reading »
My lover is full of holes. I unwrap their bandages and apply fresh unguents and try not to mark the disease’s progress. I cover them again with gauze and blankets, and when I finish, they fall asleep. Their body is laced with tubes—colorful, dead, makeshift limbs that maintain their grasp on the world. Restless, I …
I was seventeen when I got my first ghost. It goes without saying it was night. I was driving down the state on Highway 59, the two-lane one that’s narrow and desolate and mostly straight and’s had some shoulder work done recently. But back then it hadn’t had, not yet; back then, it was narrower …
