PFN – Kaleidoscoped Magazine. Theme “Ghosts & Gossip”

While often perceived as unnecessary, unkind, and belittling, gossip can serve as a bonding agent between others, a comradery. Gossip is not idle talk but dendrites branching and connecting as substitute for touch during years of isolation. Commiseration alchemized to solace. Gossip is community. To gossip can provide a healing, one of levity and mirth or of health and intimacy. But gossip is a balm, not a remedy. Loneliness, mourning, and rage haunt in the background of the chatter. Like spectral beings, they re-emerge when we least expect them to. Loved ones pass. Crisis arises. Memories twist and pull in ways we don’t understand. These ghosts decide to stay whether we like it or not.
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Ghosts and gossip weave together. Gossip starts as euphoric and sweet entry points for confessions massacring our insides out. Ghosts shake our shoulders for attention. Feed them sacrifices. Gossip gives rise to rumor, becoming a ghost itself.

And so we declare ghosts as genre, gossip as genre. Tell us about your hauntings, your voicemails and saved memos, your ephemera, your fortune cookies and your tarot cards. Gives us your secrets and your safe zones. We are particularly interested in experimental and hybrid works across all mediums: send the almost, the unexplainable, the confessions, the collaged. Send us your poems, your verse, your translations, your drawn, your ballads, your photographs, your tea, and your double scoops with no napkins.