Gabriela Denise Frank
1. THE DISPATCHGhost Phone
📍 33.849182, -118.388405; ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇, 1991: Hello?
📍 42.348495, -83.060303; 1974: ...bellwethers or canaries, I don’t know which. It’s what they call a blue note in jazz, intentionally off-pitch. A signal searching for a receiver. Damn, can’t getta tone...
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 1991: I need a memory of what normal feels like. To be around people again, to have conversations that don’t involve death. To
[[ringing]]
📍 33.448376, -112.074036; 1991: Hello?
📍 33.448376, -112.074036; 1987: She answers and begins talking to someone before she realizes the phone doesn’t have a cord attached. It’s a ghost phone, or she’s talking to ghosts. She’s unsure which.
📍 40.5169767, -80.2213477; 1999: It’s estrangement—ostranie. The familiar laden with foreign risk. In Russian, остранение. A technique of presenting common things in strange ways such that the receiver sees the world differently. Shakabooku. Lucid dreaming.
[[crackling]]
📍 64.128288, -21.827774; 1992: Due to time dilation, a century has passed on Earth. She returns a year older; the human race has aged. Everyone she knew is dead.
📍 55.00502, -3.062607; 2017: The future finds ways of phoning us in the present if we aren’t too distracted to answer. Ghosts desire warmth, our earthly attentions quicken them, but the universe doesn’t have call waiting. You gotta hang up on the past for the future to get through.
[[The ocean]]
📍 51.5073509, -0.1277583; 1990: Time, an invisible enemy. A Wolf called Death. A Woolf of Her Own, howling. Ha ha. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Death? She’s streaming Still Life with Pocket Rocks. (Get it?) Woman naps heavily in river: news at eleven. [[garbled]]
📍 38.1010337, -122.8569377; 2022: Bronze Age stone rows at Merrivale, Dartmoor, known as the Plague Market, set in memory of farmers who left food on stones for plague victims. What will mark us after our plague passes? Who’ll set the stones? How will we have merited them?
📍 36.974117, -122.030792; 1996: My ex-husband’s family served crab at the funeral. We served my mother’s liver, dry as shoe leather, with canned spinach—hot—drowned in apple cider vinegar. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t know how to use the cracker. They served it with lemon, not vinegar. Acid on the tongue either way.
📍 40.730610, -73.935242; 2021: There were birds everywhere, sidewalks covered in birds, a mass casualty. They called it an overwhelming. I think they meant omen. The birds were eagles.
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 2005: The limp oyster of my lover’s tongue salted the earth of my marriage. Nothing grew where he buried it. If my mother were alive, she’d call me an idiot.
📍47.608013,-122.335167; 2012: Eachtimethedoctorclickshismouse (flash!) alasercauterizes the tear in my retina. I wince in anticipation. Pain’s color: green. For an hour after, my vision shrieks complementary pink. Kirkegaard said the most painful state of being is remembering the future.
[[is someone there?]]
📍 Acheron; 2019: A dream: I’m a refugee seeking shelter in a bombed building that once was a school. I’ve lost my duffle containing everything I own. I dig through mountains of abandoned luggage. Just before I give up, I find it—thank g-d. I unzip it. The contents are mine, but it’s nothing I packed, nothing useful. Beat-up sneakers. Marlboro Lights. Bent springs. A telephone receiver. A human ear. Rows of narrow cots line the gym floor. To pay for my bed, I withdraw a wad of cash from my pocket: counterfeit rubles.
📍 45.523064, -122.676483; 2005: Prometheus, chained to a rock, an eagle tearing out his liver for all eternity: the price of enlightenment.
📍 33.448376, -112.074036; 1980: Sacrifice zones are geographic areas plagued by heavy environmental alterations and economic decline. They called ours a masterplanned community.
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 2001: dustsceawung—dūst (dust) + scēawung (inspection, scavenging)—is to contemplate the fact that dust was once other things. A cobblestone road. A clock tower. Roses. VHS tapes. Your pet beagle. Time unwinds order into chaos. Our destination: dust. This means you.
📍 45.523064, -122.676483; 2005: The Woolf tears the tender webbing where leg meets body where teeth meet bone. The cemetery lawn, seamless from the golf course green: I lay a stone on your stone.
📍 38.116669, 13.366667; 2018: Ancient votive ears were fashioned as prayer-phones for healing personal ailments—amplifiers to help the gods listen. Human prayers being so manifold, it’s difficult to separate one from the rest. Even gods need directory assistance.
📍 33.448376, -112.074036; 1991: If I hang up, will you disappear?
📍 42.348495, -83.060303; 2091: The brief history of the world will expire with the last cassette recorder. In the future, mixtapes will be useless proof of our existence.
[[Pronto?]]
📍 33.448376, -112.074036; 1990: The phone rings but it’s not plugged in, an old horror film trope. Creeping fog, a branch scraping on siding, breath fogging the window. Once, a serial killer stole inside my heart to make late-night prank calls.
📍 38.1010337,-122.8569377; 2021: At 400 pounds, the blue whale’s heart is the biggest on the planet, large enough for a man to stand inside. (Warning: the call is coming from inside the house.)
📍 Acheron; 1991: A dream: I’m overwhelmed, shopping in a department store. I sink to the floor and curl into a ball beneath the rounders. A dark-haired woman sweeps by. Her dress caresses my hand. I follow her down one street, then another in a gray city. I tap her shoulder. She turns. I wake.
[[sirens, whooshing traffic]]
📍 ; 1986: life thrives in the break. Cells divide to multiply—not a flaw, a survival strategy. We spend our lives clinging to the illusion of wholeness, then metastatic cancer fucks the whole thing.
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 2010: Envy born, fully formed on the half-shell, foaming. For fun, I French-kissed a married man, my tongue a vinegar-soaked sponge. He murmured, Jesusfuckingchrist.
📍 -35.1713389, 173.1532718; 2040: Does what you’ve lost describe you better than what you’ve kept?
[[If you’d like to make a call]]
📍 32.253460, -110.911789; 1997: A repository of hope and dreams, the shrieking wheels of fax machines, postmodern oracles spitting cryptic haiku via cover sheets: to / from / re.
📍 32.253460, -110.911789; 1992: Display my finger bones on pillows: Lady of Yolk, crowned in marigolds. [[Is this mic on?]] We’re gathered here today to celebrate my lifelong imposter syndrome. Chin-chin, motherfucker. A eulogy is an encomium woven in blue notes, an elegy of joy.
[[What if she isn’t my Beatrice—what if I’m her mouthpiece?]]
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 2016: Women are machines for suffering, Picasso said, and what, wrote Hobbes, is the heart but a spring, the nerves strings, the joints wheels, giving motion to the body?
📍 47.608013, -122.335167; 2022: Midnight conversations with the dead are ringed with wisdom’s residue. They say age and adversity make for mature beauty. How much dust must I wipe from the mirror before knowledge appears?
📍 42.348495, -83.060303; 1974: Human form requires fracture. A fissure splits the cell wall as the wriggling head penetrates. A fertilized egg is a blastocyst: feel the shock wave, hear the boom.
📍 5782 — תשפ"ב: We live in the Mysterium between the Already and the Not-Yet. A spirit world whirs behind our eyes, glimpsed in trances, reveries, dreams, visions, green flashes of insight. Earth wasn’t made for us, yet here we are.
📍 1945, 1974, 1990, 2059: The fact of creation proves dust can be refashioned: beingness is an argument for reincarnation. This is your life, girl—grab it by the guts—go. Pluck the liver, ride the river, drop the rocks. Remember: death is a birth poem. A crow, a rosary, a fiery reformation. Go. Operators are standing by, all lines clear. Split open your giant heart, fecund and throbbing—fly.
📍 33.849182, -118.388405; ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇, 1991: Hey kid. You from around here? Here’s a souvenir to remember the summer.
Today:
📍 32.253460, -110.911789; 2001: If there’s a way for her to reach you, is it ever really over?
[[dialtone]]
📞 The summer of 1991, I visited my aunt in LA. I was seventeen and devastated: my mother had died, my first love dumped me for his ex. My best friend flew in from Phoenix to cheer me up. We walked to the beach so she could call her boyfriend from a pay phone. She wanted him to hear the ocean. As they talked, a scraggly Sammy Hagar doppelgänger used the phone next to us. He argued with the caller, banged the receiver on the booth, and—with a prodigious grunt—yanked it free from its leash and handed it to me: a divine relic. I felt like a criminal, tucking it inside my suitcase for the trip home. I was sure the airport screeners would arrest me for stealing public property. I planned to say I found it, which was sort of true. Sometimes, I hold the receiver to my ear and listen. I imagine my mother picks up on the other side.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYHomemade shrine to Loki for conjuring inspiration and mischief
Painted blue sand dollar (talismanic echo of Carl Jung’s Telesphoros stone)
Yellow fringed tulip in a ceramic vase from a shop called Kirsuberjatréð in Reykjavik, Iceland, that sells work by local artists
Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed.
Postcard from Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood (memento from my mother’s traveling days in the ‘60s)
Stack of books to hold up my monitor (currently: Underland, Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Magical Language of Others, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Barkskins) ~ I switch them out from time to time
My favorite rubber stamps (“SO WHAT?” and “FUCK YEAH!”)
Lucha Libre coaster
Two pinhole cameras that need to be developed
A Muse made of shell, driftwood, and stone found on Pacific Ocean beaches.
Hanging above my desk: a wooden dragon named Mu Xu.
3. BIOGRAPHYGabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary storyteller, editor, and creative writing instructor whose work expands from the page into the sonic, the visual, and the performative. She writes about twenty-first century dreams: pop culture, nostalgia, individualism, midlife crisis, environmental disruption, and songs of contamination, faith, nature, and identity. Her writing appears in True Story, Tahoma Literary Review, HAD, Hunger Mountain, DIAGRAM, Bayou, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of Pity She Didn’t Stay ’Til the End (Bottlecap Press), she’s a lover of worms, mosses, and sea creatures. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com