Everyone knows someone who has died. No one can escape the burning house of the body. She’s deep in the fizzle of el Día de los Muertos. Black grease paint darkens the hollows around her eyes and is clumsily applied without flourish. The white paint, mottled by sweat, is there to signify bone. Flesh reasserts itself as a pink circle where her lips engage the trombone’s mouthpiece. The dead love parades. But not even the vermillion of the band uniform can redeem the sadness in her sidelong glances. There’s so much work in bereavement—all that heavy lifting to make enough room for this cargo of grief.
short prose has appeared in 100 Word Story, Mid-American Review, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, and Unbroken. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in Nothing Short of 100 (Outpost 19, 2018) and in NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). Recent collections include a prose poem e-chapbook, Qualia (White Knuckle Press, 2017), and a collection of short poetry, for Want (Ornithopter Press, 2017). She is an associate editor for The Heron’s Nest.
