YOU CAME ALL OVER

September 26, 2020

VANESSA SAUNDERS

YOU CAME ALL OVER the fiction. But this body is a museum of decay. He showed the cartographer his sarcophagus, which lay beneath the denim shorts he never took off. If he is in trouble, he will call. You are so American, she said. Which is to say. I no longer believe in the government, I claimed victoriously. Then we fell ill like a married couple. In my dream, you had returned home and were standing above me.

from Issue 31.2

VANESSA SAUNDERS currently teaches writing at Loyola University, New Orleans. Her cross-genre manuscript, The Flat Woman, was longlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Press Award and was a finalist for the Seneca Review‘s Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming from Passages North, PANK, Entropy, Prelude, Nat Brut, and other journals.