• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to footer

Ghost Parachute

A Literary Magazine

  • Home
  • Current Issue
  • Archives
  • About
  • Submissions
  • Blog

What to Keep

January 1, 2022 By Lisa Zimmerman

What to Keep

Justine had way too many scarves. They hung on hooks inside and outside the front closet. They draped the backs of chairs. The black wool scarf knitted by her almost-mother-in-law. It was dense and lovely, but itchy. The batik silk scarf she bought from a street vendor in San Francisco before the engagement that death broke later like a dropped mirror. Turquoise, cobalt, aquamarine—a stream of silky ocean around her neck. She loved the green and black paisley one that reminded her of her high school math teacher, a gay man who told his students teaching geometry made him so hungry, those pie wedges. She couldn’t get rid of the red one with its glittering silver threads, a scarf big enough to wear as a shawl when she sat in the overstuffed reading chair beside the window where she had sometimes sat on her fiancé’s lap. They would watch the people on the sidewalk below, holding umbrellas on rainy days, like dark and bright flowers opened over their heads. And the scarves he brought back for her from his work trips to China and Japan—cornflower yellow silk, magenta silk with tassels, the cerulean blue seascape scarf with batik dolphins and starfish. The pale pink satin one with tiny white embroidered moons on the edge. The black lace scarf she wore as a veil at his rain-drenched funeral, a deep purple umbrella above her head like an impossible flower.

About Lisa Zimmerman

Lisa Zimmerman's poetry and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Florida Review, The Sun, SWWIM Every Day, Cave Wall, and Poet Lore, among other magazines. Her poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag, 2021). Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and she has a piece included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado.

Artist Credit:

Brett J Barr is an artist/ tattooist, born in Easton Pennsylvania. He grew up in Daytona Beach, moved to Orlando FL in 1997 and now resides in Chuluota, FL. Aside from tattooing at Built 4 Speed Tattoo in Orlando, Brett enjoys many different art forms such as graphite, charcoal, paint, pen and ink, mixed media/ graphic design, woodworking miniatures and studies classical guitar.

Contacts:
brettjbarr@yahoo.com
Facebook/ Brett J Barr
Instagram/ brettjbarrtattoos
Shop Insta/ built4speedtattoos
built4speedtattoos.com/brettjbarr

Footer

From The Blog

Best Small Fictions Nomations

January 21, 2023 By Brett Pribble

The Storming of Rome by Slawka G. Scarso Juicy Fruit by Katie Coleman You Were Only Waiting for This Moment to Arrive by Kathy Fish Eddie by David James Poissant Something Fierce and Unnamed by Tommy Dean

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2023 · Wellness Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in