Kailey Tedesco's books She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publications) and These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press) are both forthcoming. She is the editor-in-chief of a Rag Queen Periodical and a performing member of the NYC Poetry Brothel. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find her poetry featured or forthcoming in Prelude, Prick of the Spindle, Bellevue Literary Review, Vanilla Sex Magazine, and more. For more information, please visit kaileytedesco.com.
Michael Kestin
Do This in Remembrance of Me
My mother says that she feels the presence of my aunt a lot. Something in the way the curtains move and shake when the wind blows makes my mother feel her there. I’ve never experienced that. A month ago, however, I experienced something else. I had dreams about her often after she died. In the beginning, it felt kind of her to show up like that. Despite the experience of watching her die and then seeing her body leave, I never had nightmares. It was always dreams about her talking to me and being confused over my crying. Even in my dreams I would cry because I was aware of it being a dream.
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Jeff Kravitz
The Death of an Artist - Kurt Cobain
In his final letter to humanity, Kurt writes at the end of the letters, “I’ll be at your altar.” If he is speaking to humanity he must be referencing the altar of religion, of fate. If he is speaking to his wife he must mean the altar on which they built their lives: the one filled with drugs, rehab, and guitars. But maybe he’s speaking to his daughter, just a two year old girl at time of her father’s suicide, and he means he will be at her crib, her bedroom altar, waiting for her like a father feels he should. Kurt was a mystery for most of the world. Though many of us would argue we knew him all along.
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Boyer d'Agen
I Believe in Ghosts: A Tragedy
I asked her to show herself to me. Please. I needed her to show herself to me. "I’m all alone," I said, "I swear I won’t be afraid." Sometimes it made me cry when she didn’t show. When not so much as a light would flicker or an object on the dash would move. There was no sign at all. I cried or I shouted or I grew very afraid.
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Beautiful Resistance: A Tiny Altar for Mia Barraza Martinez
She always looked for beauty. She looked for beauty everywhere.
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Hair Jewelry, Post Mortem Photographs and iPhones - A Lineage Of Haunting & Desire
BY LIZ VON KLEMPERER
To love someone is to want to give them your body. To love someone is to want to be given their body.
No one illustrates this point more grotesquely and tenderly than The Victorians, who bundled the hair of their lovers and wove it into jewelry. Men, for example, often braided their lovers’ hair to secure watches to their wrists. Women adorned themselves with coiled wisps in glass lockets. These would be worn on low hanging chains, allowing them to rest right over the heart. Hair jewelry, as it is commonly called, was a display of affection and devotion to both living and deceased lovers. Mourners incorporated these strands of the dead into black material such as jet, or more inexpensively, vulcanite (a hardened rubber) and bog oak.
This practice offers a variant spin on our current conception of the phrase “to have” someone. The Victorians claimed ownership over the bodies of their beloveds by transforming them into ornament. Not only was this ownership asserted very visually and concretely to others, it also symbolized a triumph over the inevitable: estrangement, death. Everyone knows that hair is dead from the moment it becomes visible on the scalp, but even so, The Victorians so delicately curated these lustrous and dead clumps to symbolize vivacity, sexuality, and the eternal.
Soon after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, however, hair jewelry became less trendy. People could now carry flattened, shrunken images of their loved ones. By the mid 1840’s, the middle of The Victorian era, the daguerreotype was made relatively accessible and affordable to the public.
The slow shudder speed, however, forced subjects to sit still for uncomfortably long periods of time. Thus, the daguerreotype was initially used to memorialize the dead, who had no qualms sitting without blinking for over a minute. Photographers concocted methods of propping up corpses or shrouding them in blankets to make it appear that they were leaning on a sofa or merely resting. Mothers could carry the black and white image of their deceased children with healthy rouge superimposed on their cheeks. In this way we got closer to our ultimate desire to possess the people we love, to own them in a constant, albeit fabricated, state, to lessen the sting of death and departure. Desire shape-shifted into a new era.
A century goes by. Our preoccupations morph but never evolve. Tonight, I fall asleep cradling my phone, which contains thousands of images of my former lovers. Now they are ghosts, swirling under a blackened glass frame. Sometimes the ghosts talk to me. Not to me, exactly, but at me. Your ex lover is 5 miles away from you now, my machine chirps. There she is now, for 6 seconds only, an apparition, a puff of smoke. Tonight, I am fed this video: she is smiling garishly against the flash before tilting her device upwards to capture the sea of revelers behind her. The scene ends abruptly as someone utters her name, and I am in the dark again. I know that my machine gains nutrients from the outlet it is plugged into, and that comforts me.
We’ve worked for centuries to keep the dead alive, and now they are, almost. The frame updates. Mechanisms work silently inside, allowing us to see those who have departed us laugh, drink, and stare with an agonizing adoration at a face that is not our own.
In the continuing lineage of desire, we have become the designers and facilitators of our own haunting. And everyone knows the secret to a good haunting is to make the mind play tricks on itself. Now instead of the illusion of eternal life, we have fabricated the illusion of eternal closeness. Death is not solely the passing of the body but also a severance of ties. We are haunted by the living dead, by the people who have vanished from our daily lives but not from our consciousness. In my desire to possess my beloved, I know where she drank coffee this morning. I have read the article she skimmed on her lunch break.
I try to put away this vehicle of my own haunting. I try not to carry it to bed. Still, it feels as though I am relishing the image of a corpse as I go to refresh my newsfeed on some park bench during my lunch break. It is noon, and I am drowsy, hungry, and seeking the comfort of a screen that contains all my bright and illuminated dead behind it.
Liz Von Klemperer is the author of the unpublished novel "Human Eclipse." She also writes for Art Report, and has work forthcoming in Autostraddle. When she's not writing or tweeting at @lvonklemp, she coordinates events at The Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.