This selection, chosen by guest editor Jillian Fantin, is from PRESSURED SPEECH by germ lynn, released by Bottlecap Press in 2022.
death phone
content warning for suicide attempt
Trophy Wife calls the death phone but it is a butt dial basically a big misunderstanding T - wife might have let it slip to her therapist that after thirteen or so glasses of Pinot Grig who knows the precise measurements in bottles she once believed that the only way out of this marriage was up so she stripped off all her clothes and scaled the building thirteen or so stories up who knows the precise measurement in death wishes Trophy Wife doesn’t remember the impulse to jump and thinks why involve the police? but she is in the back of an ambulance and she is sobered up
& there are black seatbelts crisscrossing the gurney & it’s not like she went willingly but she takes the unbuckling of herself as shameful knowing she wasn’t exactly in control & now wife is lounging cross-armed in the bumpy interior since no one will restrain her she does it herself Trophy Wife knows the pain is self inflicted & theoretically has money so she says if she was going to pay 800 dollars that she might as well see the city Trophy Wife is joking with the EMTs on her silent ride to the psych ward & they are laughing & they disarm the siren because they are not in a hurry
And on some other side of the death phone on the emergency line there is coughing and frightened and not exactly coherent & he gasps out the damned numbers of his zip code & the line is busy & they are not in a hurry
And inside the death phone there are placental trees whirring and beeping clenching transmissions in crackling leaves white noise suspended in primordial drip like moths wrapped in silk still flapping but barely
germ lynn is a writer and cellist. Their poetry can be found most recently in The Reservoir, a collection published by Autonomedia Press. Their debut chapbook PRESSURED SPEECH was published as a Bottlecap Press feature. Their science fiction chapbook What You Call was published by Radix Media as part of their Futures series. they are currently working on compositions for solo voice and cello.
Jillian A. Fantin is a writer with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2023 Sundress Publications Editorial Intern, a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, and a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow. With writer Joy Wilkoff, they co-founded and edit RENESME LITERARY. Jillian’s debut chapbook, A Playdough Symposium, will be released this coming summer from Ghost City Press, and more of their writing appears in American Journal of Poetry, Homology Lit, Tilted House, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.
