liver, liquor, cancer, cancer
“Everyone pays a price for being born.”
-Jose Gonzalez Prada, translated by Jeremy Glazier
-Jose Gonzalez Prada, translated by Jeremy Glazier
Cigarettes and Jack, tobacco and hop,
every engine runs on an addiction. I have not acquired my grandfather’s taste for bitter; don’t smoke because of how my grandmother stared at my lungs, red as her oxygen. There is a greed in survival. When I pass, I don’t want to know what kills me as it kills me. My grandmother was found draped in sheets like the statue she had become, a piece of marble in the living room, a cheek of frigid veins. My grandfather was a phone call before my birth. I never saw his hair grey or his face crinkle into a brown bag. I see myself in their photographs, rewound to my age; we were not so different. More likely than not, I have started my own undoing, refusing drinks, the bonding over a lighter and a pack of Camels slowly dying in the moonlight. All over a fear, the same she had those years after she quit, her hand in mine at grace, voice giving thanks for the nourishment of her body burning inside long after the fire. |
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Geoff Anderson curated Columbus, Ohio’s first shows for mixed writers, The Other Box, and translation, Lingua Franca. He’s a Callaloo fellow, was nominated for Best of the Net, and his chapbook, Humming Dirges, won Paper Nautilus’s Debut Series (2017). He has work on Tinderbox Poetry Journal, burntdistrict, District Lit, and www.andersongeoff.com.
Tealia Ellis Ritter was born in Illinois and currently lives and works in rural Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, The New Yorker, at PRC: Exposure, on Women in Photography by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, at The Magenta Foundation, at Catherine Edelman Gallery, by Taschen NYC, and at Humble Arts 31 Under 31 exhibition. Her work has also appeared in many publications, including The London Daily Telegraph, Stella Magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits Magazine, and The Financial Times of London.