Birthday in Père Lachaise

Rob Spillman

Godard-grey December twilight
pilgrim-pressed gum blobs
on the nearest tree to Jim Morrison,
his barricaded grave.
Still?
The black and white grave cat doesn’t care.

Hello Oscar and Marcel
Hello Alice B. and Richard Wright
Oh! Hi there Isadora Duncan and Ana Karina

Moss-covered, crumbling vaults,
collapsed monuments to once great men,
no family or fans to still tend.

An ancient man sweeping clean the granite slab
over the four-hundred-year-old family
the C-shaped woman bent over her cane
taxi waiting for her to finish flowering
her respects while laughter
spills down the steep chapel steps.

Leave no physical trace. Scatter
my ashes to the wind, let
the good energy I scattered
to the universe be
my monument.

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Rob Spillman

is a

Guest Contributor for Panorama.

Rob Spillman is a writer, editor, teacher, and literary citizen. He currently teaches private classes and offers manuscript consultations through the Shipman Agency’s Work Room, is a contributor to Lithub, and is a Fellowship Coach for the Op Ed Project. He co-founded and edited the seminal literary magazine Tin House, which published from 1999-2019. Tin House was the recipient of the inaugural CLMP Firecracker Award for Magazine of the Year in 2015. He is the recipient PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing, the Vido Award, presented by VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, and the CLMP Energizer Award for Acts of Outstanding Literary Citizenship. His writing has appeared in BookForum, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Guernica, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, among other magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009. He served as the Chair of the 2017 PEN World Voices Curatorial Committee. He is a member of the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, and is one of the founders and a Master Practitioner of the story-exchange nonprofit Narrative4, and is on the Community Advisory Board of the WFMU radio station.