Death Wish
When this Ultralight fell onto the bare tips of pines, hikers saw the
flare of yellow jacket billow like a parachute. His body arrived at the
airport in CARGO, a family comforted that He died doing what he loved.
Dearly beloved, say this, too, about me. Let me die bent ass naked over
the kitchen table, let my last words be Oh. Baby. Say, She loved that
position. Let me fall face-first into a book. Say, She died on that page.
Or eating chocolate–let the mortician wipe dark cake from my lips,
roll me into the crematorium heart-stopped and sticky.
—
This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!
Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: space neon neon space by luna rey hall - March 24, 2023
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: space neon neon space by luna rey hall - March 23, 2023
- Sundress Publications 2023 Poetry Broadside Contest Winner Announced - March 22, 2023