Joie Peña

Death and Capitalism

by: Joie Peña

It’s a funny thing when you begin to plan for your own death. You begin to sleepily search “Google cheap wills” and remind your partner about your 6 figure debt. You compile lists of bills and think about all that you will owe. All that you will owe, as if that is the legacy you will leave. That is the main concern for your partner, not the many hours of memories or where he will hang your wedding dress or his head when he learns of your last breath... You scramble to put life insurance and retirement accounts in his name, wonder if he will be responsible for your collections and your pulse quickens when you contemplate the stress he will endure over the financial implications of a funeral, so you quickly decide that you will, against your Jewish faith, burn your body and donate what’s left and have a celebration of some kind, somewhere, in a park, in a house, on Zoom, for fuck’s sake because the world is closed and because your life is expendable but your debt is not.

15

Dutch Wife

by: Anne Marie Holwerda Warner

May wine Elf cups —this tea smells like horses

In mid-spring when they are just coming up the name peony doesn’t come, what comes is only the image of ants as they lap and untuck shy blooms—or is that another genteel falsehood? The canvas I want to stretch before you— Do you want to look for twice-stabbed ladybird beetles? Wayside wrought endearment & pickled herring strawberry freezer jam on rusk— To you will I always be toaster tongs If you never leave can you really be home? The seed he scatters is her time. She sets the bar low and is grateful. Julia’s daughters make a campfire cake with Pirouette® logs, stove-charred marshmallow fire pit stones, and food-coloring white chocolate flames. Enough with the cerulean, cadet, robins egg, periwinkle. There once was a crayon called cornflower. It was a stonewashed gray-violet, a sun-bleached summer glove kind of blue. In pandemic every ordinary and unrelated disappointment feels like a shovelful of rocks poured on your head. Still the joy of found things is amplified, a double portion of wonder, a long awaited newborn with ten perfect tiny moons in his fingernails. One fork tine skewers a Takis® chip and another a mango cube. Whatever this was it can’t last.

I threw in the language of dominance and something unlocked. I’m just trying to create space for myself. We may have lost the ginkgo during pandemic but not because of pandemic— the same way we lost Mike our Korean War vet neighbor who died in a golf cart accident while wintering in Arizona.

In the early morning on the day before Pentecost someone burns a flag at the corner of 4th & Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky.

Slimy trails of sidewalk slugs glisten in the morning light. A damselfly’s wings cast twilight shadows before you at the corner of 38th & Chicago. Wood pewee Spring azure The strawberry moon

17