I
Your Husband Was a City in a Country of Sorrow
In my body the memories were lodged. This writing is a dim bulb on a black cord in the examiner’s room.
I prefer you do not attempt to read it. I cannot help but feel responsible for your discomfort. So as you read, you will feel me tugging it from your hands.
—Toi Derricotte
I’m never finished answering the dead.
—Li-Young Lee
Almost Animal
after Käthe Kollwitz
I heard they no longer sew eyelids of the dead shut.
At the morgue, I busied myself counting
the lacerations on my husband’s neck and wrists.
I wore sunglasses and a light jacket
and pressed my palm to his wrapped chest.
After the dried blood was wiped from his face, his jaw was set
with a piece of string. They tried to leave a natural appearance.
I wanted to smooth his clothes; I wanted to clean his hair.
His throat was a village, my palm an iron of matrimony.
I wanted to burn the holding room, jar and sell the ashes.
At home, the hours layered like moths.
I didn’t eat and slept some nights. This was my way
of waging war. There was nothing left for me.
I carried him on my back and over my shoulders. I carried him
across my forehead and between my shins.
But it didn’t matter; he was going right into the fire.
I should have been the one to have prepared his body.
kill lies all
After his death,
my hair did not grow,
my nails peeled and flaked,
my bones were lifted into a sack
upon my legs. Even my muscles
decayed from the lack
of wild oranges and sweet tea.
This was the new myth of my life.
When visiting Spain, a cricket was loose
in my kitchen, its chirp was
like my name, like the words yes, yes.
But what could a dead woman know
of yes? That summer, one cricket
became two, two became four.
It was then I memorized
the trill and grind of my name.
Like a vandal with a can of red spray paint,
I could scrawl the words kill lies all
across my Guernica. Who will
be the bull, the horse? Who
the severed head and arm?
Under the bald lamp, like an eye,
I will expose old scars and breast-feed
a shadow of myself.
Killing Jar
There are days
I go to the mailbox
and find letters
from my dead husband
translating for me his suicide:
the cold blade softened into cursive,
his fear licked onto the stamp,
as the return address: the date of his death.
I look forward to these letters.
Some are addressed to my son,
I collect and keep those.
At times this is a greedy act,
but he is too young.
I see my body asleep in my son’s body,
my eyes behind his eyes.
But now I worry that there is distortion
like Parmigianino’s Self Portrait
in a Convex Mirror, his hand
slightly reaches out to me,
slightly curls back into itself.
When I was a girl, my uncle
mailed to me framed collections
of mounted butterflies.
Blue morpho. Tigerwing.
Malachite. Moon Satyr.
These are all names my husband
could take now. I imagine him
as Goldman’s Euselasia
or the Great Eurybia.
I know that to kill a butterfly,
you use a killing jar.
Because they are so fragile,
sometimes butterflies batter
themselves in the killing jar.
At night, this makes me wonder
about the mixing
spoons in the bowl,
the tangles of the dough
such small, temporary fights.
For a clean kill, it is better
to first stun a butterfly
by pinching its thorax.
But you must practice to get
this method right,
so it is recommended to try
it on common moths or butterflies
you are not concerned about.
Pinch smartly between your finger
and thumb like tweezing a piece of sky.
Honing
A sharp knife is a safe knife.
There is a difference between honing a knife
and sharpening it. The metal rod that s...