being dead

In memoriam: I touched the frame of your casket with the same hand that once cradled your head.

I sing beneath the trees in Brooklyn

just as the sun casts its haunting shadow

I sing with blood in my teeth from

the spitting memory of you that I cannot

wash from my mind:

my tongue & my lips drawl in the ecstasy of forgetting your face

In the wintertime, I promise I'll clasp you in the yellow warmth of my hands.

Baby, your memory tastes like metallic silver blood

that drizzles from tooth to tooth. You are the infection

I glide my swollen tongue over but cannot ever tame

Each month, my breasts fill up with age & my nipples sing to each other as I once sang to you

Now I say Kaddish for every cell in my Body that grows in your absence

I wonder what would happen to the world if I were like you

and didn't wake up one day

and broke all of those little promises I never got to keep

Would a mound of dirt and twigs grow over the hill of my once-Body?

Will the pink flesh by my thighs peel as I suspect yours does?

I paint your face every Thursday, & I hold the canvas like you held my hips when you made me Woman;

We were bound by the bone and laced at the teeth, & our shoulders hung like old dusty curtains 

Now I sip tea in the evenings wondering where the time went &

wondering if your Body is as cold as mine is during the winter months

& Now I gaze at swollen tree trunks, wondering if our Bodies would ever look like them

had we both lived to be the same age