In the Name of Love

by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

Kyle Head

we buried dog bones, grabbed a rattlesnake by the throat, thought we could cry without ruining our makeup, checked our pulses each night after brushing our teeth to see we’re still here, rolled dice & prayed for snake eyes, chased lost monarchs, stole the light of day & flossed our teeth with it, danced around lanterns swinging on the breeze, sung a love song we knew ended in tragedy, called ourselves lucky ones, performed short plays on the stoop, gagged when the playwright declared we must kiss, pretended we did & shed a couple of tears onto withered plants on the windowsill, whispered Broadway show tunes when words failed & fizzled in mid-autumn air, & oh god

we’d do it again if we could — we really would. Anything with a pulse is still alive with the fortune of being able to make dead things into a spectacle. A myth says the night sky is a cemetery, that stars in the sky are already dead, echoes of light from thousands of years ago. But they’re still here. After all these years, the poison has not taken hold, nor did the lead-ridden tapwater. We didn’t die fast enough in the name of devotion. Some called it misery, swallowed the snake’s hiss, played Russian roulette, & made a song with no words. We didn’t have much to say back then. & maybe we were too young for this. Children putting on dollar-store costumes, reading off shoddy scripts. We didn’t even have a name for it — that’s how little we knew.

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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com