Editorial note: the first poem below, “in order to separate or purify,” is best read on a desktop screen due to formatting of the poem.
in order to separate or purify
for MNC (November 12, 1991-May 28, 2016)
A cremation chamber is also known as a retort. A retort: a “repayment of insult or injury.” To retort: “to answer” and “to heat in order to separate or purify.” From Latin retorque: twist back.
•
a milkwhite statue of two sylphs draped
around an orb of light
their faces on either side of it echoes
light’s own children
one girl is a dream of Alphonse Mucha’s
in the globe she envisions a theater
where everyone’s face is like hers licked with elixir
her hands around the light like she was born a painting
this scene and lantern fish
are how they know God exists
and this is the only place in the South they can say so
the other girl more shadow and future
will spend the rest of her life looking
and trying to write the play
in which both girls live
but she will never look again
like this or like the sprite
in her mother’s room there has always been a lamp
with a woman all in black dancing
beside a huge mosaic moon
maybe there is a song of this or maybe her mother
just made it seem so
if that is a black-eyed susan behind her ear
this and the lamp are too how she will believe in God
when on the other side of the light there is no one
•
i first saw you in a dusk-slow purple
storm clouds over a cemetery at night
where we’d sit all June humming
and i ate only plums that summer
their insides the orange of lightning’s borders
we rubbed rosemary between our fingers every day
because it grew there
and not at home
and we sutured that scent to Salem
•
you wore a poison ring with milk inside it
and sometimes let me drink
witched and winterlit
something of moonshine long-buried under snow
but too you ran scissors
up and down the powerlines
so the calls never made sense
until the static of ashes proved
my mother right
that i waited for spilled milk on live wire all along
•
a vein stems up a child’s leg
and i think it strange that children have veins
too small to be made of blood something so practical
when did you even grow old enough to have veins?
to need anything inside of you but milk and song
•
it has been years now since i was younger than you
•
the first time i visited your home
your mother had just made cookies
it was so normal
except that it was the middle of the night
but no one noticed
she was kind and asked questions
and didn’t let us sleep in the same bed
she must not have known i didn’t know
how to touch you anyway
•
your mother so normal
except that you smoked cigarettes together
you your best friends and your mother
dresses leaning over porch railings
all breathing smoke
and tasting ash
•
i’ve heard it feels like being in a womb
seconds after needle slips inside vein
wrapped in a warm calm
so tied to sleep or drowning
that at the end it doesn’t matter
if you wake or are born or sink
•
It takes 2 to 2.5 hours to cremate a body.
you lived for twenty-four years six months and sixteen days
The ashes will weigh approximately 4 pounds.
when i see snow now
it is impossible not to see your body
Ashes misnamed: pulverized fragments of bones.
i would’ve told you
i would’ve told you
i cannot put them in milk and salvage them now
Nothing organic remains, only a thimble of salts and minerals.
Bodily fluids a mist from the crematorium exhaust.
it is true what they said in science class
we are all breathing you always
Like fingerprints, ashes are individual.
snowflakes then
maybe a white reflection of ash
Family can watch the process through a window.
it is not like watching milk boil
it is not like watching snow
•
when your mother went through your shoes
were the songs you strung like warning
playing in your room? did she end up cradling
your moccasins’ rubber and leather
far into the Shelby night
where if music isn’t playing
it’s so country quiet you can feel the stars in your ears?
like inside the shoes she might feel
an unashed footbone
did she talk to you that night?
her rhythm cut with odd pauses
all night a near-whisper
like a man cleaning his rifle at daybreak
and talking to himself¹
like saying it now
might reach an unashed ear
•
there were whole nights full of water
when we swam naked
we were pearls in the lake
white marble drops of calcium sinking in loops
our bones milk’s solid sister
our bones a small story about life that doesn’t end
•
i dream i am sometime when you are alive
i jump in a lake and you are nowhere to be found
i lie alone on the shore and you are now here to be found
grit and smoke and every story
all i need is the earth
to buzz like it did when you were breathing
•
your ashes exactly moon-gray
as if a hunk of moon had fallen to earth
been woman
and broken into ashes
a tablespoon of spacedust
i keep in a pink plastic film canister
on a shelf in my room
•
there should be a liquid version of cremation
bone turned to milk
so it can be swallowed
kept in a poison ring
injected in the veins
•
unhook yourself from this elegy
where there are needles
you could step on
the darkness is clear water
alight with lantern fish
1 Ocean Vuong.
As Above So Below
remember me late night
my back to the cemetery grass
giving stars the names of tombstones
and divining the stories of their encounters–
these two are feuding siblings
slinging coffee over their parents’ will,
these three are lovers sending tiny sailboats
between each others’ homes on the creek.
(Just so I could hear you listen to me. (Every invention is true.))
don’t forget the outfits I put on
my memories of myself as a child, the stories
of you as a child, how I added stripes and color,
how our families’ old photos blushed.
when I am far from stars, remember
the white of my teeth in the graveyard’s natal dark,
how I always danced in your company, how I learned
my best name from something you called me in the evening.
remind me of figs. how we swore when we bit into them
we heard the ghosts rustle toward their sweet bellies,
lore of a time when fruit could be held.
