"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Dane Myers, "Sleeping With God" (Ginosko, Issue #6)
Cynthia lifted her head from Dubliners and stared at the pale north wall, opposite their bed. Albuquerque’s April evenings were growing long and the fading light created a shadow that made the ironwood cross above her dresser appear crooked. A rare drizzle filled the air with a smell other than dust and muted the yaps of the neighbor’s three schnauzers. Cynthia tried to think how she could get out of sex, at least for the night. Wednesday had become the worst day of the week: Bible study and sex. That night’s discussion had been on Isaiah—her favorite prophet, until Jim had nicknamed his penis Isaiah. ...
Randall Brown, "Let the Wind Have It" (Ginosko, Issue #6)
I discover her in the basement, uncovered, her lips stained green. When the house ran dry, she drank mouthwash, then cough syrup, finally anti-freeze. I imagine her in the grave, still warm. Instead, they burn her, give her back to me in a vase, handing me the responsibility for the gesture that will define her death for me—the scattering of my mother.
A week after the funeral, my father calls. He wants the ashes. He will do lines of my mother until his synapses can no longer fire. She stopped loving him a year after the marriage— and told him so. He didn’t believe her, waited forty years for her to be proven wrong, forty years of asceticism and celibacy and silent waiting. He deserves the ashes, he really does, except my mother did not want to be with him, not in life, surely not in death.
