When I Come Back from the Dead

(an excerpt from Saint Dymphna's Playbook)

When I came back from the dead, I came back as a color. Brambleberry burgundy. The color of dollar store lip gloss and sour gummy bears. When I returned, no buses stopped for me at shadowed street corners. Security cameras lost me in empty aisles, where teenagers wearing each other’s clothes pocketed vapes and lube. When I came back from the dead, I found myself in old motel rooms, the dank smells of sex and bruises hiding under sheets like lost children. The janky ice machine buzzes an old, faded tune, and the whiskey dead gather in the cool smell of humid cigarettes and night sweats. When I returned, no buses stopped for a color. I found myself an old, faded tune, wearing other people’s clothes. Shadowed street corners—lost security cameras find me. When I come back from the dead, this is the place I return to again and again. The birth of a body that never unraveled.

Hillary Leftwich is a multi-media writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023), Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming from Limit Zero, 2025). She teaches creative writing, business writing, and environmental writing and storytelling at several universities, writing organizations, and nonprofits for adults, previously incarcerated and hospitalized youth, and unhoused populations. She centers her writing around themes of class struggle, the impact of disease, mental illness, ritual, and the supernatural. On the outskirts of the writing world, she teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities along with writing. She is a professional Tarot reader, an Usui Reiki Master Teacher, death worker, and speaks with the dead.

Find her author services here: Alchemy Author Services & Writing Workshop

She is currently working on a series of hermit crab/collage essays and video poems investigating gun violence along with her background and experience growing up in Colorado and its history with mass shootings.

Hillary Leftwich is the author of the forthcoming collection Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How To Knock from Civil Coping Mechanisms (CCM) Press in 2019. She earned her MFA in fiction and poetry from the Mile High MFA at Regis University. She is the poetry and prose editor for Heavy Feather Review and curator/host for At the Inkwell Denver, a monthly reading series. In her day jobs she has worked as a private investigator, maid, repo agent, and pinup model. Currently, she freelances as a writer, editor, writing workshop instructor, and guest instructor for Kathy Fish’s Fast Flash Workshop. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in print and online in such journals as Entropy, The Missouri Review, The Review Review, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Matter Press, Literary Orphans, Sundog Lit, NANO Fiction, Occulum, Jellyfish Review, and others.