Instructions For Life After Life

Cast my ashes into an Atlantic gust alongside pelagic birds soaring, sleeping.

Watch them disappear over rogue waves.

Mourn me with salt-stung eyes and encyclopedias of words left unspoken.

Celebrate me with a frenzied fiddle and jittery jig.

Find me in the memory of a parting embrace.

Hear me in sweet words whispered in dark spaces.

Take solace knowing you, too, will one day suffer the pyre.

Picture your ashes strewn to the wind’s caprices.

Believe in an eternal afterlife of repurposed atoms.

Let us rest, not in peace, but spiraling together in an infinite universe pulsating with ancient energies.

From Guest Contributor Elizabeth Murphy

Becoming Theoretical As A Point

All I had to do was suggest we are not alone. Victims and assailants kept dividing anyway, splitting like atoms, disappearing until there was nobody left on earth; so, when the tricksters from all over the galaxy turned off the stars, it was God who wondered where everybody went. The head behind the hands had never been afraid of the dark. If other fingers pulled the hands away from the face, the eyes, having rubbed off onto the palms, could only watch the skull nestle between them as they covered mouth and ears. I’ve seen enough anyway, he might say.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

Cheryl's new series is called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries.