"Prospero's Last Party" is out in Yellow Mama

Prince Prospero has been deposed, but the parties go on. “Prospero’s Last Party”—my fictional takeoff on Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"--came out in YELLOW MAMA today. Big thanks to Cindy Rosmus for soliciting work from me after we "met" at an FBomb Flash Zoom reading in July.
 
I wrote this last summer, added Christmas references when Cindy said it would be in a Christmas issue, and I wondered whether it would be out of date by the time it came out. But there are actually enormous Christmas parties going on at the White House, despite prohibitions about size, though masks, it turns out, are optional. And the pandemic deaths continue to mount, though Prospero hasn’t said a word about the national tragedy, much less about the role he’s played. The number of deaths today was a national record. Biden can't be inaugurated soon enough to begin to get this under control.
 
YELLOW MAMA is a crazy horror zine with often lurid art (see this issue’s cover). Cindy knows a lot of people and familiar names always pop up. Paul Beckman in the last issue. Gay Degani in this issue.