October 2024
Image by Wix
Poetry
Aileen Cassinetto
Three Poems
To Treasure Island for a wardrobe fitting before the funeral cortège in Season 4 of Man in the High Castle
—with a line by Philip K. Dick
I had no lines, but got along
with the costume designer who dressed
me as an officer’s wife and decided
I should wear the vintage black tulle
and satin whimsy hat perhaps to make
up for the black pumps that were not
designed for comfort, and since I was
a background actor in an alternate
history, what was the harm in unlearning
who won which war as long as
my grandmother didn’t turn in her grave
because I don’t think she ever got over
what she had to do in the years before
liberation. Looking in the mirror
in a retro skirt suit, I thought I saw
a ghost. But it is 2018
in the real world, and Treasure Island
is a boneyard, a place for old longings
where the only ghosts are long-gone lady
beetles and irradiated moths. Steel
shipping containers sit atop the bones
of a walled city, and there’s a white
retriever with a six-pound lump
on his belly and the sight of him,
I know, will forever haunt me.
Here we are where the World’s Fair was,
and I wonder what we were before
we were this, quarried rock that bloomed
Recent fiction
by Travis Flatt
Recent nonfiction
by Samantha Sapp