Dobbs v. Jackson Tasting Menu

the pamplemousse
has finished rotting
everyone’s sky
under my french nails
our moon translates
to spoiled egg
my goose flesh is more
a country of fowls
smacking their skulls
on the same pine
the planet says it savors
me like last drops of wine
it’s not my choice
to re-seed grenades
to lie
fresh cells are seasoning
our homes like water
for soup mmm—
notes of pyre girl—
talk hot vinaigrette
spit supercontinent rifts
delicious past genomes—
mmm
good heresy tastes
as sweet as baby
not that i would know
something ate up
all the light—everything
everything else
is night

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Annie Schumacher’s chapbook “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

On Persephone’s Night Terrors 

1. Either I will fall asleep or I will not.

2. If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.

3. If I dream vividly either I will wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath or I will not.

4. If I wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath it is because I am cursed or I am not.

5.  If I am cursed it was because I was born cursed or I was not.

6. If I was born cursed either I inherited the curse from my mother (or not).

7. If I inherited the curse from my mother then she inherited the curse from her mother, did she not?

8. If I ask my mother’s mother about it she will either deny cursing my mother or she will not.

9. If she denies cursing my mother, will I stay in hell?

10. If I eventually fall asleep, I will be seeing and listening to everything at once, my senses fixed like a dog.

11. Where is the drug to drug this hell out of me?

12. I swallow the tablets like honey.

13. Even if I never fall asleep for fear of losing what I left, which is itself a kind of curse, I will swap out new hell for old hell, or I will not.

I wake to sticky green leaves.

Swans

It takes eight years to exit the pop music museum.
Two older women, arms linked, dance to Waterloo.
We bought hats like that, we walked across a bridge
in Cuenca like that. When do you know someone?
When did I stop knowing you? My sadness spills
out a bouncy Swedish pop star’s lips,
the rising melody covering my heart in a brown sap.
The crowd carols along to the next song, searching
for cheap flights to Athens like we did. I peer through glass
at the metallic stage costumes, the headlong curve of my heart
-ache—were that it anger, I could hate the costumes.
I exit the pop music museum in heavy, platform-soled
tears. White birds sway in the water, my sister sings happy
birthday from a distant time zone. At what point in their
disillusionment did they transform?

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Flesh and Bone Zuihitsu

They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me.
The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years
of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.

My therapist tells me I’m too resourceful and clever to let family
suck my will to live; I hear more work. She says step back.

Says observe the process and sends me an email
summary of our recent call. The subject header: Snow & Peace.
A picture of the oak in her Maryland yard.

It wears a floor length gown of white pin-dotted snow
accented with one green birdhouse, frosted cupcake feeder. It says
here, here is sustenance. How I want

to take all my therapist offers into the marrow of my mind.
Mother’s way of comforting was to declare me her own
flesh and blood. There is a bird called lammergeier,

German for lamb vulture. It raptors the bones of carrion,
drops them onto flat rocks to expose the marrow.
My therapist is one of these bone droppers. She asks

what I will gain from allowing my mother’s opinions to define me.

I see a little girl as a cloth napkin dropped beside bone china
where marrow has been sucked from the calf’s bone, just a baby,
cross-cut. Osso buco, Italian for bone with a hole.

The spongy cake of our bones consists of hematopoietic cells called

Poiesis, from ancient Greek, the emergence of something
that did not previously exist; also, poetry. That flesh and blood

is made of poetry, that lines break like bones, that I emerged
from the syntax of a mother who drops rotten rotten
daughter. Will I never find sustenance?

I find her wedding announcement, 1964, The Scranton Times.
Cake topper of a woman, the bride wore a Chantilly lace
and white silk organza chapel gown with a scalloped neck.

Her headpiece of sheer rosettes with a large flower on top
was edged in seed pearls. What about that seedless bird feeder
nailed to a frozen oak somewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula?

Peninsula, Latin for almost an island; or a daughter.

I worry about the birds. Remember they prepare for the cold,
stockpile seeds, and pack pockets of air around their bodies.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Like Qafia to Radif

my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips.
Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.

Pressed against mine like Charon’s obol, death could be so blessed.
A modern libation poured for Aphrodite, both poetry and prose lips.

My lover’s smile, sharp as a scimitar, separates top from bottom—
Parting ways they flash a pearly shift, glossy-toothed kameez. Oh lips!

That mouth my muse, I tongue an invocation, call for inspiration:
Passion’s incarnation, my lover resurrects with save-my-soul lips.

Like the fifth bayt in an ancient ghazal, they round in rhyme-refrain.
A closing of flesh and pucker of hush, I marvel at broke-the-mold lips.

Not to whistle but to kiss, this lover’s embrace I could never resist.
Whispering Candice, they touch my ear and I hear, give me those lips.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Dish With Bamboo Leaves

Style of Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (Japanese, 1663–1743)(?)

So I am trying to make sense of
this world; why my mother throws out

   anything that shows any sign of
   chipping; why she

insists on buying porcelain, or
keep the jagged

   blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
   Like any traitor daughter I promised

to become rich and finally make
it out of that place. Saying absolve

   reminds me of the palm shadows
   thrown across the hot Californian

concrete, sandwiching, jarring,
captured butterflies baking in

   their own passions. Rain felt like
   absolution sometimes. October miracle,

drinking through skin like lotus root;
lips always chapped;

   our little rituals. I scratch her back for her
   every night; little jets of white;

red; dragging fingernails
across, gleaming sailboats from travel

   brochures in bloody bays;
   edens in sunrise, suns in

seas; girl practitioner, skin
horror vacui. The weather, she says.

   Needs a lot of lotion, cracking,
   damage; fine porcelain from

dream screwtape marriage; white and
blue maiden who bears her king on

   a mattress of fine porcelain.
   Threat of overthinking taken up

by Japanese kintsugi. Months repaired with
bits of urushi and gold. Exchange, take up any

   Japanese art. Self deformation. I am trying.
   The rot must precede rebirth.

The weather, pottery chips
easily; always more susceptible

   to hives and clinical paraphernalia under
   the sun. Five bucks and I bought the sun.

Fifty sheets of gold leaf to put in my sunscreen.
Mother’s cheeks glisten with tear streaks

   when the light hits in the right way. Like hot
   concrete on Ventura, after an October rain.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Three Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht:
da ward die Zeit, Dann schwiegst du lange
Dein zwetes Wort ward Mensch und bange
(wir dunkeln noch in seinem Klange)
und wieder sinnt dein Angesicht.

Ich aber will dein drittes nicht.

Ich bete nachts oft: Sei de Stumme,
der waschend in Begarden bleibt
und den der Geist im Traume treibt,
daB er des Schwiegens schwere Summe
in Stirnen und Gebirge schreibt.

Sei du die Zuflucht vor dem Zorne,
der das Unsagbare verstieß.
Es wurde Nacht im Paradies
sei du der Huter mit dem Horne,
und man erzahlt nur, daß er blies.

---

Your very first word was: Light :
with that there was time, then you were long silent.
Your second word became man and fear
(we still darken in its sound)
and again your face reflects this.

But I don't want your third.

I often pray at night: be mute,
who remains washing in gestures,
and whom the spirit drives in dreams,
that he writes the heavy sum of silence
on foreheads and mountains.

Be thou the refuge from wrath,
who violated the unspeakable.
It was night in paradise:
be you the keeper with the horn,
and one only says, that he blew.

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern.
Und vielleicht erlaubst du noch eine Stunde den Stadten zu dauern
und gewahrst noch zwei Stunden den Kirchen und einsamen Klostern
und lassest funf Stundennoch Muhsal allen Erlostern
und siehst noch sieben Stunden das Tagwerk des Bauern—

Eh du wieder Wald wirst und Wasser und Wachsende Wildnis
in der Stunde der unerfaßlichen Angst,
da du dein unvollendetes Bildnis
von allen Dingen zuruckverlangst.

Gieb mir noch eine kleine Weile Zeit: ich will die Dinge
so wie keiner lieben
bis sie dir wurdig sind und weit.

Ich will nur sieben Tabe, sieben
Auf die sich keiner noch geschrieben,
Sieben Seiten Einsamkeit.

Wem du das Buch giebst, welches die umfaßt,
der wird gebuckt uber den Blattern bleiben.
Es sei denn, daß du ihn in Handen hast,
um, selbst zu schreiben.

---

You darkening ground, you patiently bear the walls.
And maybe you allow another hour to last in the cities
and you still allow two hours in the churches and remote monasteries
and leave five hours of hardship to all redeemed
and see the daily work of the farmer for another seven hours—

before you become forest again and water and growing wilderness
in the hour of incomprehensible fear,
since you are your unfinished image
reclaimed from all things.

Give me a little more time: I want to love things
like no loves them
until they are all worthy of you and far.

I just want seven days, seven
of which no one has written yet,
seven pages of solitude.

To whom you give that book
that contains them will remain bent, over the leaves.
Unless you have them, in your hands,
to write yourself through them.

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig.
Die Lande einfach und die Wasser faltig,
die Baeume riesig und sehr klein die Mauern;
und in den Taelern, stark und vielgestaltig,
ein Volk von Hirten und von Ackerbauern.

Und keine Kirchen, welche Gott umklammern
wie einen Fluechtling und ihn dann bejammern
wie ein gefangenes und wundes Tier,—
die Haeuser gastlich allen Einlassklopfern
und ein Gefuehl von unbegrenztem Opfern
in allem Handeln und in dir und mir.

      Kein Jenseitswarten und kein Schaun nach drueben,
nur Sehnsucht, auch den Tod nicht zu entweihn
und dienend sich am Irdischen zu ueben,
um seinen Haenden nicht mehr neu zu sein.

---

Everything will be big and powerful again.
The land is plain and the water is rippled,
the trees huge and the walls small;
and in the valleys strong and varied,
people who are shepherds and tillers of the soil.

And no churches embracing God
like a refugee and then a lament for him,
like a trapped and wounded animal,—
the houses hospitable to all the knockers,
and a sense of unlimited sacrifice
in all actions, and in you and me.

No waiting for the afterlife and no looking beyond,
only longing not only to profane death
but to also practice on the earthly,
so as to no longer be new to his hands.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

---

Obit in Another Language

You spark
         a drag queen in a death drop.
The runway gleams.
Strobes flicker.
You’re bald.
Elizabeth Regina
         expiring while standing
         in the cancer ward.
Ampersands pour from a champagne flute
         as you fall.
A bell rings.
You win.
Chemo drips from a bag through a tube
         to the port in your chest.
Footlights shatter as judges gleam
         in their simmering electric blue
         velvet armchairs.
Followed to the grave by many
         the obit said
         but that could mean two types of procession.
A stripe of bodies tumbling into a grave
         or a mob of grieved lovers in ripped clothes
         shadowing you.
You’re nude, writhing and gasping
         in a turquoise sequin sea.
You’ve learned only one language.
You’ve opened only one eye.
Magic is the art of believing
         what you see.
You see what you’ll never know
         and turn your head.
You remember the untranslatable
         heat of a lover against your back.
Jut of his ginger furred belly.
You write a poem about him.
You blink and write the miracle again
         containing different versions of you.
You begin another life.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Birth of the Blues

Was it Miles Davis’s “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back fingering those keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale, and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?

Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps,
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?

Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?

Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature?” Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?

In Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
Or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane, a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child’s first giant step?

Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.

Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I’m in a good mood

I’m in a good mood
for being spiteful. Tacos:
tongue and head-meat. I want
to feel a little cannibalistic
though not. It seems to me
if you’re going to eat
an animal, you should be
able to eat that meat
from cheekbone or socket.
Vegan yet? Eat that
muscle that makes words,
makes moo, moves cud.
Kiss the cow. Eat the kiss
chopped with onions,
cilantro, and both salsas.
Tonight, let the fat sizzle
on the coals and the smoke
flavor the meat. Nothing is real
I say as I eat tacos.
I also love cows.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
                                but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
                        alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
                                But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Another Love

Never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts.
—Alice Walker

Not insomnia but horses
galloping in my night chest
in the low plains

your blood is drained
of iron the hematologist said
eat more red

meat

binge vampire soap operas
half-dream of sucking a slick
thrumming heart.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Blue

Was it April? I’d moved into that drab place
up Maple and you—remember this?—
came over with wine, with oysters, even,
snagged from the fish market past the canal.
Can you see it? I can:

We’ve spread our feast on the bare boards,
not a stick of furniture in there, no table
for any of it. Spring fingers of sunlight
go probing, lengthening, stippling
until all the tall windows blank out blue.

Remember how our bodies reached
and touched and tasted—arms, hands,
lips, how our limbs entangled
on the hardwood stretch of floor, how
our murmurs, then cries gave us back
their muted echoes from the high dusty
moldings of the ceiling and drifted down?

How the moments became one moment,
how they made one place where we
stepped out of time.

                           Too much later, how
blue time rushed in and mauled us,
holding us in its cruel jaw. Drove into us
the cruel blue of its tooth.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Flu

Deep in winter, always Madame
Sosostris, hands paler than first light,

every reflective widow’s
blighted eye I pass as a ghost

might. The days hiding
underneath each wood plank, rats

gnawing through the piers,
beams, blind glass holding it all

together. The corridors,
waiting for the solstice to bear

spring tidings, promise that
warm winds will erase the stares—

back behind every mirror. Learning
to never ask about my future,

just as I have learned to love
with my mouth closed and words

unshuttered, love like prongs lending
another block of wood to a feeble fire.

When the snow softly beats the earth,
the woman who is known to be the wisest

in Europe whispers I love like the snow.
I pretend that she is not there

so that I may pretend that
I do not love at all.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Growing Mythology, or, To Turn a Frog into Something That Isn’t a Frog

Tuck islands in the lyric. Offer a watery spelling of light.
The disruption of stars in the blue-black oil

unearths a verb from its worm palace. Sing.
The green algae ribbons were just released on parole,

now the banks are becoming sentient. Whoa,
they’re really holding this place together.

Between two mirrors, a face becomes
prepositional. Under Hydra’s nose

it’s hard not to imagine animals
outside physical law.

Every inexactly green blink
brings you closer to amphibious

and you can’t stop believing
Robert Lowell died in a bog.

It was only the idea of a bog,
in the same way a question like

Need I move mountains to hear the sea?
puts us on our backs.

The cicadas are mythicizing everything
with their remarkable racket.

I so want to join, to chirp the orphic end—

In their language, the frog is the face of our moon.
Light sways, a little drunk.       An ancient body blooms.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
                                but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
                        alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
                                But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

The Painter

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
the prayer like paper, the light illumined our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot our raucous and joyous past loves
when I asked you to listen for the screen door's slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.

And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.

I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough bronzed skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in Viet Nam.

And you put down your brushes to confess
we were going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.

You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Map of Matter

I could talk about the past like anyone else
about surfing the winds of childhood
to get here and the things I remember
as if the limbs of earth can be owned
by reminiscence
but that’s someone else

I don’t have a story to go back to
or a scenario to play out Everything
I’m from was made up by the Shaw Brothers
and their starlets under dramatic lighting
cat-eyes tinted lips mansions cocktails

Those were not the days and I didn’t live
through them as much as I slewed
across the surface of their rotten skin
because the decayed hand of the past reaches
for everyone not one finger of truth

Don’t lie. Don’t lie. My memory speaks in sleep. But be
creative and quick about it. Soak in the salt
of the world’s illusion. Deliquesce. Be true.

I can reassemble the dismembered limbs
of the past by ingesting them
then making a new body of history
and pining for it like a farmer weeping
for her country lost to flood and fire

I have total recall of the Belle Epoque the Age
of Innocence the Age of Anxiety the turn
of the century the Ways of the Swanns
by demarcating the borders reconfiguring the atoms
of my birth I’m born again
and again

In the movies in the library I watched and read read
and watched until I was entombed
with recollection molecules degrading in travel
in moves
from East to West village to city town to town

The spaces between I lit with candlelight of nostalgia
to illuminate the path of sequined shifts beaded gowns
satin shoes I wore them over my tattered t-shirt dirty feet

Once I moved on a flat space a blank topography
a village for squatters the homeless
not worth visiting or revisiting
in the dark in my telling it transforms
becomes the enchanted forest apples snakes gardenias
a place I find myself time and time
again then again In my telling (tell and retell)
I redraw the geography of slanted truth
and an ending happy
enough to last forever and ever
after that

A Basalt Princess

Pacific reaches for the valley.
In side glances see-throughs
in fuchsia dawns and hell fire dusks
with a latent thrust of impudence:
outer space beckons to the sea trench.

This once was her isle -
with quenching guava scrub,
manioc, taro fields, mango orchards,
decorous breadfruit trees -
glugging the sky
between Capricorn and Equator.

She delivers the shadows of her house to me.
Looks me up and down until
I ebb into remoteness.
Ninety years have streamlined
her down to timelessness.

Crowned with island rose and ivory.
Porpoise teeth inter-woven with buds
gleaming like mortuary relics.
Glory still nestles in the furrows
of her face smoked in tattoos,
a Brueghel blue of soot and thunder
from head to toe.

Her voice, a blast of surf,
a dark inclusion in a storm’s crystal.
I can see her as then,
draped in royal tapa,
one splendid smooth arm
fanning the dormant air.

Then my own time topples
when, suddenly clairvoyant,
she predicts that money
will devastate the world.

Luxury

Before the Florida roads were
bleached whale bones for barons
to pick their teeth
we had the luxury to flick
the fucking matches.
We stole fruit from laden
branches and stars
still tipped scales. Remember
the luxury of disconnected everyone.
Remember the luxury to walk where birds
hid in their tiny rooms singing. The luxury
to joke with clowns driving
tinkling trucks. The luxury to stand
on a beach without fish hooks
in our knees. Remember sticking
out your thumb because you could.
Remember when no one prospered.
Remember never knowing
who we might become.

Where Nobody Is

Last weekend, a friend asked to go for a walk—
somewhere without people, she said
She doesn’t want to see people:
hiking trails are packed,
so I suggest our town’s cemetery.

There are people, you know, but not really.
She agrees.
We meet at the entrance.
What a beautiful place to be put to rest—
overlooking the pacific.

We walk up and down the hills,
reading tombstones, sharing stories.
It’s all too familiar. I spent my childhood there:
my Austrian mother obsessed with death.

My friend spoke of her mother’s passing,
and her ashes are in the closet
under a fake candle, and how each day,
she whispers good night.

No wind in this cemetery; trees are still.
Something in the distance beside a gravestone
caught our eye—a balloon on a stick in ground,
gently swaying back and forth. flowers beside.

We glance at one another and walk in its direction.
We arrive to gravestone of Jose Garcia:
January 13, 1989 - April 1, 2016.
A photo of his truck in the lower corner:
gone but never forgotten. joined the twenty-seven club.

I glance at my watch.
It’s his birthday.
He called us to sing to him and we did:
we wished him a peaceful journey

I still ask if a cemetery
is really an empty place.