On my bedside, Sylvia whispered about picking strawberries as I slept, and Richard Sassoon getting me prepared to meet my never. It was probably a decade of this inseparable connection with a dead person.
Poem By Catherine Gantt
Art by Kiki Ren
Trying to hang in.
I was looking through a weathered copy of The Bell Jar and it made me so sad.
Sylvia was a comfort for years. I broke the spine of three of her Journals because she was my reason to keep going and I couldn’t stop highlighting and bending.
I always had her journals in my bag or in my hands. She went to two continents with me. On my bedside she whispered about picking strawberries as I slept, and Richard Sassoon getting me prepared to meet my never. It was probably a decade of this inseparable connection with a dead person. Who did what I promised I would never do. Now the thought of her fills me with heartbreak,
I cry between pages.
Slamming it shut.
Maybe I should put her words under the bed, under the floorboards, back in the oven, in her house with her kids after the divorce as she panicked about how she could keep going with all this—she holds out her heart to a door and no one answers.
About the Author
Catherine Gantt lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she isn’t listening to a podcast and doodling, she is watching reruns of I Love Lucy snuggled up with her two dogs Ruby and Harry.
About the Artist
Kiki is best described as 45% Elvira, 45% Dolly Parton, and 10% Danny Devito. Though she’s always been a lover of all forms of art, technology has always been her forte. She studied computer science for four years before dropping out and coasting through life in various retail management positions. That’s until she found her true calling: being an embarrassment to her family online. When she’s not whipping up websites or blessing the world with memes and generative art she’s hunting for oddities at thrift stores or reading the most disturbing pieces of experimental fiction she can find.
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