Otherworldly holidays: in Conversation

A poetic rumination on the surreal intersection of necromancy, personal loss, and cosmic humor, blending reflections on psychomanteums, magic, and otherworldly holidays.

Dear Chad,

I surmised “Psychomanteum” was a portmanteau so surreally gussied it deserves an infomercial that proceeds documentaries about middle earth holidays. Holidays where “The animals rise, grateful / & ungrayed,” flora considering synthetic options. Only in a Foret opus does plant life germinate aided by palm plastic (“like a bright thorn began in a doll hand”). Subsequently, the last time I saw a doll portmanteau, marionettes were tangled on a garage sale’s folding table.

To my chagrin, psychomanteum is lexically extant. Joe Nickell, “a former stage magician” describes the psychomanteum as “a chamber with a mirror into which one gazes in hopes of seeing spirits of the dead. The chamber is dark, save for a dim lightbulb or a candle.”¹ Sleepover summonings conducted in bathrooms, moot once necromancy accepts LED. Gazing at gazers is an underplayed literary opportunity, though your opening extolls it:

The secret to scrying is learning how to look

between wax grapes & find yourself
observed from another dimension.

I read your poetry alongside Steve Bellin-Oka’s Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, one of that collection’s deceased’s “spleen rupturing like a water balloon / thrown against the side of a barn.” Whereas Bellin-Oka’s speakers practice epistolary divination in such poems as “Postcard to John, with a View of the French Quarter” and “Letter to John, with Plague of Absent Bees,” your instructions emphasize cinder and ichthyology: “Leave your long cigarette / burning near the bathtub,” “Become / very bored like cannibal fish watching mountains // grow nose hair.” When our mutual friend Angela died, I imagined her suddenly privy to the interplanetary skinny on our favorite quandaries. This is the person who went out of her way finding me a DVD on the Falkville Ufonaut, her roommate from Pascagoula, MS, where aliens made like HVAC, putting the duct in abduction. She’d appreciate your lines “Soon the stars / will earn another edge, go quiet // under all that cosmic kudzu.” Way to combine Southernness and outer space, Chad. Maybe it’s Venusian magnolia that revives Bashō, who appears in your seventh stanza, his “robes dotted with radiant dandruff,” confirming a bardo’s forbearance of Head & Shoulders.

When an early mentor introduced me to Bashō’s haibun technique, my prose blocks brokered codices. Proxies for slideshow scrying, haibuns contrast “memory removed to make room,” the afterlife as winsome as microfiche. Post-haibun or nonprofit workweek, I wrote a bathroom spider ode at my foodbank job where I coordinated data in a cubicle equal parts donor software and ice tray aspirant. The building’s arachnids stationary like our fundraising thermometer once the burger-chain millionaire adjusted his pledge. A financial custodian, your ending rethinks the estate-gift concept, telling us

You are often

better off leaving all you loved
to a spider that lowered itself
from a fan blade, drifted on
a breath, listened to your lungs
which seemed to hum like
the source of all silk.

Ponder the scale of propeller to spinneret. Ponder Joe Nickell. Believing in magic means a podcast on dove-accommodating sleeves downloaded in the Kuiper belt. Your claim, “The future / always finds you but never looks as wise / as you wanted,” reminds me that one can séance a quadrant, but a psychomanteum needs the crystal ball that dated convexity’s PhD. Or the sodium-vapor in your poem.

Sincerely,

Jon

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Prompt

Names of other highfalutin architectures: megarons, sudatoriums, undercrofts, and whispering galleries. Poeticize one. Steve Bellin-Oka’s “She Was Always Sleeping Then” mentions “wall paint drying in humid weather,” a smell you can feel. Include a similar synesthesia when writing about preparations required of your room.

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1. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/experiencing_the_psychomanteum/