6.93 lbs

The cremated remains of an approximately 110 pound woman weighs 6.93 pounds and costs $53.40 to ship from Missouri to Texas.

There’s no poetry in that.

thursday at the latest

there are things I want to shout

In a low deep voice strongly

the good, the bad, the ugly

returning a call to the chapel

 – the mortuary?

the one-stop-shop that ships

remains of the dead parcel post –

I spoke in a little voice lightly

(yet sure) and irreconcilable

to the years I’ve got behind me

Sister arrives tomorrow

thursday at the latest

I Hear the Drums Echoing Tonight

In my rear view mirror a woman is preoccupied with her visor mirror, checking…her hair? Her eyes? To the left, a man is staring in his own rear view, patting his waxed on helmet, engrossed. Both with windows rolled up on a sixty-five degree morning that rarely occurs here. I consciously touch my own hair briefly, finger-combing a tuft at the back caused by driving five miles over a forty-mile speed limit with the window down.

Bad songs on the radio; thankfully, a full playlist in my head.

shipping human remains

It was spring that year

wet met dry lungs on a deep inhale

lush, deep green, the land of souls

brother in a baby blue box;

I had thought not to visit the place again

not to bury another, not soon

but the days, the years got behind me

and this land has bits of my heart:

grandfather, grandmother, brother and

soon sister will sit atop, amongst

family long fraught with distance

mother did it need to be so high

the tone of her voice attempts a tremble

smoothing to a familiar

condescension

betraying

the worry of her words

she has my number now
and won't stop calling

and then we'll take it higher

the breeze was cool, windows down

I sat in the back seat of my sister’s two-door

that would be mine one day

after she left, after she ran

Eddie Grant’s Electric Avenue jacked up high

street lights and the glare from late night store fronts blinding

Sister smiling behind the wheel

little fifteen and
I thought the world was mine