“Green Swoon” - Jonathan Weinert
When we were dead, our vexed tongues hung limp. You'd made your done face, more or less, and that was it. We slept a slow green sleep. And then the grass grew bronze and stiff and all we knew was grass and the ways through grass and the small strange laws of sleep. There the ferns grew like hair on the heads of the old dead. The young dead ate their jam of fig and white cheese. We wrote our odes and told our jokes and laughed or rolled our hard white eyes. You'd think we'd grow as tired of this as we had in life. But when the weird bell called and the halls of the dead were filled with the smells of pine and moss, then how we loved our deaths the more and kept on in the ways of death and left the chance of new life to the ones who weren't yet done with time. We were. We'd get in bed there, in the grass town of the dead, left leg to right leg, sex to sex, and let death flow from chest to chest, a cold sweet air we had no need to breathe, and hold it there in a deep green swoon while the earth filled up with dust and passed through an age of dust on its way to the last days of dust.
