Nonfiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
Nonfiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
THINGS THAT ARE NOT FICTION | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Remember To Breathe
"In the late 1990s I started having mini-meltdowns inside my head as I played: whether this or that was the right note to play next, whether everyone in the room hated the note I was playing now & thus perhaps hated me by extension."
from “Gender/Genre” by Erin Bertram
"On the door hangs a sign, sometimes plastic, sometimes bearing the smudges of printer ink, & often with a line drawn neatly down the middle: he? on the left, she? on the right, & me, standing straight, stiff as a board, standing upright between them."
In Memoriam: Tom Raworth, by Martin Corless-Smith
"I knew Tom for about 20 years. Or ten minutes. It’s odd to say knew, instead of know. I’ll say know. He was as open and opaque when I first met him at a reading in DC as when I last saw him at his flat in Hove. Like a pond of fish—an elegant electric-fast consciousness that withdrew if you delved too deep. It was as if he was saying, I’m right here, it’s all right here. What you get is what you see."
Piper J. Daniels, “Sirens”
An exceptional essay on demons, mental illness, self-harm, and suicide, which we're publishing just in time for Christmas. "If human life is an oath, then suicide for me was like an oath recited backwards, a protest against the physical body that gave entrance to that first strange and violent ghost and all that followed," writes Piper J. Daniels.