Everything is green, too green. Even Demeter is dying. Here in Westchester, 20 years after the marriage ended, there’s a heat wave, and thunderheads in the still, blue sky. There’s a different kind of stink, not like the city, but still sweet. Things rot in this heat. Only yesterday, I finally took out the garbage, it was starting to ferment. This is the apotheosis of high summer. It is that space, where the wheel of the seasons is on the brink of shifting again. You can stand the heat, because the smell of things rotting is also the first sign of re-growth. Wallace Stevens wasn’t wrong, because the quiet death of all green things, in high summer, late July, is sweet.
Lillian Ann Slugocki is Project Editor for Angels Flight * literary west, nominated twice for Best of the Web, a Pushcart Prize, and winner of the Gigantic Sequins prize for fiction. She's been published by CCM, Seal Press, Cleis Press, Heinemann Press, Spuyten Duyvil Press, as well as Vol 1: Brooklyn, Bloom/The Millions,Salon, Entropy, The The Daily Beast, The Nervous Breakdown, Hypertext Magazine, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Manifest-Station, The Forge Literary Magazine, BUST Magazine, Angels Flight * literary west, and others. Her latest book: How to Travel with Your Demons is published by Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2015. She founded BEDLAM: New Work by Women Writers, a reading series @KGB Bar. MA from NYU. @laslugocki
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Lillian Ann Slugocki 