6 Quotes by Holly Walrath

They construct billboards out in the sea, painted allegories adorn their facades, hawking sex and sentiment to the opulent, the fortunateof the people of fortune, who bury their dead in the sand where the light of heaven is closest at dawn, and farther and farther away at twilight.

Each day Marda gets closer. The sub circles coral reefs off the coasts, where mermaids are said to like the colors of the schools of fishes, and train them to swim around their necks like jewelry or live behind their ears, beneath their long hair. Sometimes mermaids like shallow places, but mostly they like the dark and the beautiful, uncharted, abandoned, soulless parts of the undiscovered world.

We live in a world of unfulfilled fairytales.

fluttering amidst the stars / stands the thin black/ stalk / of a glimmerglass girl /

I tell my sisters: / cultivate loneliness / like you might care for / an orchid, turning it / gently towards the light, / serving it water like wine / aerated, purified, filtered.

But he goes all quiet. His ghost eyes roll / up in his head, white-on-white-on-white, / and he runs his shaking hands over his scars, / looks up like he’s going to wish on a / star.