MEREDITH

MEREDITH

You arrange your attire
dressed in the end of days, a time
when summer sun calms down and strokes the skin
of the lawn, dusts all of us
with amen and shalom

Parts of you we didn't know would fly
are loosed above power lines

your reasons are smoke rings
your answers are punctuation
your goodbyes are wind chimes

This is not a burial

Adam's apple brother, would you swallow
a song? borrow a heron,
a swan, lift-off knees-knocked?

I am your Sister. I am your Mother. Let me cradle
in my knobby arms
the loss you have become

Meredith, I know
I know you are made of stone
I know your fingers are uniform.
Do you know how deep to go,
grave girl?
There's more to you than bone,

that girl, that calico
the marbled fur,
so mossy, so pale,
flirting with the gray
slant of old stones
stuck-up in the yard of beyond
the pale, a marker for every soul

Can we forgo the places they plant us,
under cedar boughs, old elms
that escaped disease?

Meredith, I know
you curl round the holes

rough-tongued
lapping at the grass and blood
and soil,
the tricky flick of feline tail,
a tentative paw
at the groove of your name.

This is not a burial.

By Reka Jellema
Edited by Brendan Bonsack