Review of Vigor Mortis by C. W. Johnson

Vigor Mortis by C. W. Johnson appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Goblin Fruit.  In this interesting and original prose-poem (which somehow wiggled by the editors whose guidelines claim that they do not publish prose-poems), a mother of two children periodically dies, is buried, and then rises from the grave to carry on as though nothing unusual happened--at least for the first three quarters of the poem.  The poem ends ambiguously, deliberately so no doubt, with death as a metaphor for the bitterness and waste of life that often follows divorce.