Gill & Selle — August 2025
Lauren Selle and Caitlin Gill traded art and words. Caitlin shared this image, titled “Cow Skull,” with Lauren:
In response, Lauren wrote this poem:
Remember to Smile
Here lies a remnant of life after living.
See the slopes, cracks, and teeth?
Tender flesh turned to shrine.
Return it’s smile, won’t you?
Your vigil will be brief, a fleeting exchange.
But mind your manners in the theatre:
an ancient dance is taking place
on the surface of bones not quite bleached yet.
An unseen legion of bacterial ferry men
each takes their turn at this table.
A microscopic kaleidoscope,
orchestrating the dissolution of life.
How do we reconcile
the perceived complexity of living
when all we leave behind
is a temple for single cell beings?
(pay no mind to the existential dread)
(it too shall pass)
* * * * *
Lauren shared this poem with Caitlin:
Five I’ll Do it in Three
I.
Agony that floods my system with no source.
How to describe it? Like cracking a bone. Like swallowing steel wool.
No string of words can bear the full weight.
My metaphors each try to lighten the load, pallbearers for a funeral I’ll never get to attend.
They carry their burden with dignity while my memories watch the procession.
The phone is still in my hand. The sky cannot be bothered to fall.
Someone I loved is now very far away, farther than physical distance can measure.
Everything that might have been has forever lost its chance to be.
Who do I blame? How do I handle the pain? There’s more of it than there is left of me.
I’ll drown in it, won’t I?
II.
Stitches where the pain first erupted.
The cavern it roared from is bigger on the inside than out,
because it’s also where the love lives. (Or so I’m supposed to be learning.)
I’ve done them myself, so they’re not very good.
My parents used to thread the needle for me. Guide my tiny hands. But it doesn’t seem fair
to ask the one I have left to help me with my wounds when his are still bleeding.
The metaphors have turned from pallbearers to watchmen. Waiting their turn to become jokes I’ve designed to draw prying eyes away from any tears in my own.
Should I take the blame? (It’s not like she can.)
I’m trying to shoulder it all, but I know things are slipping.
I’m worried one day I’ll lose the strength to tread water.
Will it bleed through the cracks and undo all the healing?
III.
A scar that pulls when I stretch.
Some days it aches, some days I forget it’s there.
On rare days I seek it out and can’t seem to find it. This is terribly sad in its own way, but it’s part of the deal.
I once deemed the pain an unwanted presence but it lives with me now: a spiderweb I’ve built a shrine to in my head.
(She hated spiders. It’s rather cheeky of me to compare her to one. Oh well.
It’s my metaphor. Nothing she can do about it from wherever she is now.)
I meet other people with similar spiderwebs.
We compare designs. We laugh. We share the most reverent silences.
There is no one to blame. The pain was never more than I could handle.
I did not drown. I was dyed in it, like wool.
Isn’t my pattern beautiful?
In response, Caitlin made this piece, titled “Decomp (Squirrel)”:
