This Fire FuneralBy Z Zoccolante When I was a kid, I used to tell people I wanted a Vikings funeral – lay your body on a boat and push you out into the water where archers shoot fire arrows and watch you burn from the shore. The bible uses fire (and water) as metaphors for God’s cleansing and purification. Take these two: And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as...
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Things We Save from Dying By Z Zoccolante I’ve walked up the white marble like steps probably 600 times and today is the first day I see them. Tiny gray segmented bodies upside down with a furl of lacey legs in the air. I reach down on the step and gently touch them with my finger as they curl their bodies into a gray bowling ball the size of a small pea. Roly polys as my client called them. Pill bugs, scientific name,...
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When She Leaves for New AdventuresBy Z Zoccolante I’m amazed how she clears out almost everything to leave on a new adventure, shedding physical things like water droplets, piles of clothes, candles. Each special object, wanting them to be taken, reused, and it reminds me of that things that holds inside of me, that part of me that makes a nest or a home or some storage vessel for my past or my present. Maybe taking a sense of...
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The Common Thread with All My Therapy ClientsBy Z Zoccolante As an associate psychotherapist I’ve seen many different therapy clients for many different reasons but I’ve noticed a common thread. There seems to be an internal struggle. A part of us wants freedom and a part of us feels tied to old patterns and fears. We want something different but what we have feels familiar. It’s the same way that kids often get attention....
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Blue Morpho LoveBy Z Zoccolante When she opens her eyes, salt tears dried against her cheeks, she remembers that she’s capable of expansive romantic feats and feelings, like oceans and sky. Fingertips tracing infinity, her name in his mouth. They travel together through the dark sides of the moon and meet again, against thousands of others who crowd into the room as it dims and dancing lights swirl around the ether, playing the...
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This Is What I Know – On Racism and Me By Z Zoccolante I’m a white girl born and raised on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. This is what I know. As I’ve traveled around the mainland, and foreign countries, I’ve watched how the color of my skin allows me to move through the world in a way that I can blend into the background, or even be invisible. Even in Europe, if I don’t open my mouth, my Italian features place me in a position...
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