Whether it’s in the strangeness of returning to a place that has so quickly and drastically changed, or as the projection of colonial imagination onto a landscape, or in the lurking of ghosts in the aftermath of war, fantasy abounds in reality. Read from the Fantasies folio collection of six pieces of poetry, prose, and comic.
Văn An had neglected ritual, not realizing that this was a land now full of ghosts left too long unmoored. That there might be consequences for forgetting to fear.
Hard to tell from your / Silence where you’re taking me. / But I’m guessing / It’s loin-deep in the place / Where they’re collapsing / Entire cosmologies into pulp and paper.
How do I tell you that I have done this before? / How to build a diorama of what I am not.
I keep the butts of my clove cigarettes in a candy tin. I pound it shut, hide it away. So it stays a secret.
I am the last of them—a woman with her own dreams, not salvaged from the cloud-based data lake that I created.
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