Special Featurerbdpoetry, Mari Pack

Mari Pack: Fear of Death

Special Featurerbdpoetry, Mari Pack
Mari Pack: Fear of Death
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FEAR OF DEATH


The Wikipedia page on immortality

lists aging, disease, trauma, and

environmental change as problems

to be resolved. I will resolve them

with magic.


I pull a tarot card, and the card is DEATH

strident atop his white horse

cheeks gaunt, battle flag raised

a five-petal rose, symbol of changing

things.


I like change only when it is good.

Change is good only when it gives me

money, beauty, prestige or pleasure.

When it gives me pain and dishonor

it is bad.


An evil woman on the internet says

“Death spares no one,” and she is wrong.

I will never die. I have drunk

the magic milk, and now I will live

forever.


I will live forever in my body

with its youthful, dewy sheen.

I will not become like Tithonus, a cricket.

I will not allow any Goddess

to love me.


I will love only myself. I will build a wall

of loving me. This wall will protect me

from pain, dishonor, or the five-petal rose.

It will not protect me from my want

of immortality.

Mari Pack is a poet, editor, copywriter, and radio producer from the outskirts of Washington, D.C. She earned an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 2013, and later worked as an English teacher in Israel and copywriter in Brooklyn. Now an editor for Guideposts magazine, her essays, articles, and poems have been published in Quail Bell Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Establishment, among others. She is a current M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY.

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Born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, Christine Stoddard is a Salvadoran-Scottish-American writer, editor, and artist now based in New York. Her work has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Native Peoples Magazine, The Feminist Wire, the New York Transit Museum, the Condé Nast Building, The Huffington Post, and beyond. In 2012, the Puffin Foundation honored her with a national emerging artist grant in photography. That same year, she debuted her documentary film, The Persistence of Poe, at the Poe Museum and on PBS-Richmond/Charlottesville. In 2014, Folio Magazine named Christine one of the media industry's top 20 people in their 20s for founding Quail Bell Magazine. Her book, Images of America: Richmond Cemeteries, which she co-authored with Misty Thomas. also came out that year. This year, The History Press published her book, Hispanic and Latino Heritage in Virginia. 
 

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