by Savannah Slone

I’m not here to write about cicadas, but I’m glad you are because they’re my favorite song. I’m too busy finding grief in sun patches.In stained glass shapes, fused out of order. In electric eels, quicksand. In pretending I have night vision, my viewfinder on selfie, telepathy in the dark, convincing myself I’ve already been dead for months. Final green horizon flash as the last patch of flesh mulches. Burning myself with the match I light from inside my casket. Hallucinating murmurations. I walk across the floor as a wind-up toy, my body on fire. My body, a pharmacy. You hear my alarm clock at my side, six feet under. Memory spillage. Sublingual eulogies. Brain splatter at golden hour. Sparklers after dusk. I wonder what I grieve from the dreams I don’t remember when I wake.

Savannah Slone is a queer, bipolar, and disabled writer, editor, and English professor who currently dwells in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Paper Darts, The Indianapolis Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Pidgeonholes, decomP magazinE, Crab Fat Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Homology Lit, as well as the author of An Exhalation of Dead Things (CLASH Books, 2021), Hearing the Underwater (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and This Body is My Own (Ghost City Press, 2019). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at savannahslonewriter.com.