vestigial creatures

i

watercress condensation sticks to your fingers and melts.

it is monday and you are slicing iceberg lettuce for the salad

and at dinner you sit and hold hands around the table to pretend

nothing is different. make like you don’t see cells unfolding

into ash in a small pot on the fireplace mantle; make like you don’t see

decomposition. you like to pick at the dead skin under your fingernails.

(sometimes it is the only acceptable place for dead things to lie.)

you know that dust is primarily made up of human skin and

you wonder if the urn on the mantle has ever spilled. it is wednesday

and your mother loves you the same she always has, but you are coming alive

as she is withering away and sometimes you’re scared

of breathing in her cells, her skin; you wonder if she is in the dust.

it builds up in corners and on the old dinner plates you keep

in the glass-cased cabinet like tiny secrets clenched between your teeth.

you wonder if you are in the dust, too.

ii

on friday you plant crocuses in the backyard. (she always liked crocuses.)

purple petal lips sprouting from soil that squishes between your toes

remind you of her. they furl from finger to hip,

and you imagine them curling acquiescent cadaver, crested and

callous against pelvis sunken and serpentine like white stars caged and ribbed.

you saw her body, afterward.

her eyes were still open and fixed on the doorway where you stood

and you felt naked. her skin sagged over shoulder blades that stuck out

like chasmic artifices you could touch and fall into;

you could feel the stillness pressed into you. (heavy dehumanization.)

you’ve never been afraid of death–you can stomach the deadweight–

but you didn’t expect to feel the absence. it burns like ephemeral gold.

you open the window in the kitchen.

the smoke of it makes your eyes water.

iii

you think you might just be hollow.

sunday makes a week and your family doesn’t really talk about it.

you went alone to the crematorium, all full of caskets and black boxes

big enough to swallow you. you watched them carry her in

and started to wonder what kind of a person would choose to work

in such a place where the air is stale on your tongue

and the walls push back at you until all you’re made up of is cotton webbing.

it’s a strange place to bring a dead person to.

they must be more deserving than a cold metal table and

dingy waiting rooms. expensive wine glasses and heavy china

cannot equate to this. this was once a person.

you touch the urn on the mantle. this was once a person.

you swore you could smell it.

flesh burning, smoking, sizzling, old blood thick like barbeque

spilling and swelling into dust.

you are quiet as you spread and sprinkle her over the purple flowers,

imagining her stretching into them and stilling.

you think you must be the only one thinking of her.

the eulogy was short.

you think, perhaps, death must make vestigial creatures of us all.