From your shower. Jesus, Tom, no one does that. Hangs themselves. No one does that. Tom hanging. Christ. From your shower they found you. The gardenias didn’t bloom that spring. My hands sore from all the weeding and I had to go see the baby elephant at the zoo without you. At the funeral, all…
Tag: Death
A Thousand Dead Blackbirds Fall from the Sky
They say it might have been lightning, maybe hail. It might have been fireworkson New Year’s Eve, drunken truckers boot-snuffing the smouldering matches.Somehow, they all died. A quick airborne heart-stop–engines turned off. Wind plucked feathers from wings twisting maniacally, marionettes cut loose from their strings–some skyward cemetery gutted open, raining onto cars, small thuds on…
Objects in the Gas
It was a Monday when my mother asphyxiated herself in our 1988 Camero, locked behind the electric garage doors that never worked when it frosted. She had three things with her: a banana skin, her wedding veil and my dad’s wristwatch. She had pulled the pin at exactly three thirty to offer us the comfort…
Siberia
Eleven days after my husband died, he telephoned me at dawn. “I can barely hear you,” I said, sitting up in bed. “Somewhere in Siberia,” he whispered. His notebook was still on his side of the bed. I wrote in the half-light. The directions were incredibly complicated. I had to ask him to repeat himself…
Grief Triptych
In memory of Matt Kinnison Unnamed, unknown I am telling an unnamed, unknown someone, that I dreamt Ed was still alive. But I am telling the unnamed, unknown person this in a dream. Even as I sleep, I know that it’s complicated. I see Ed twisting in pain on the floor. Thin as a greyhound,…
Like That
When I first thought of my own death,I had no poems to put it in.Just me and the bed tucked under a cold ceiling that pulled away into black mouths. Years later,I imagined someone’s hands on my hips, my breasts. That scaredme in a different way. The ceiling paused and watched, the bed tensedunder me….