Recognition

I am five years old, in a green or blue dress
—velvet, with white tights and black-strap shoes.
 I am in a funeral home and everything is green.
The carpet is green and maroon—flowers curl
and leaves grow over and under our feet.
My eyes meet about everyone’s crotch.
Black and brown slacks, mostly pleated.
Skirts past the knees and stockings just slightly
darker than women’s white skin. There’s a coffin
somewhere, but I can’t see inside. I can see
its dark wood. Its green velvet skirt.
Maybe we match. The dead man’s skirt and mine.
I lose myself in the crowd of legs, but find
my father’s hand with my right. I look up at a laugh,
but not my father’s. I don’t know the man,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. Well hello there! 
Did you think I was someone else? I tug—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.

I found my parents outside. The green was bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques named
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.

Just after Christmas, with chocolates separated
in clear glass bowls, my grandma told us
she wanted to die. Not in words—in memories.
She missed her family. She told good stories
about dead men and women. She was happy,
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listened patiently in metal folding-
chairs and on the quilted gold couch. She had a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looked like herself, in every photo.
Always the same smile. I imagine she smiled
when her daughters caught her talking to ghosts
between sleep and awakening some days.
My family felt guilty for knowing we knew
she would die soon. Her medications sat
in a green plastic organizer on a tiny metal table.
The silver shone with small yellow and green
painted flowers. We promised we’d visit again soon.
She died a few weeks later, January.
We knew. She was singularly ready to die.

I can see in the coffin now, her gray hair plastered
to her scalp and her waxy, paper-thin face. Green dress.
She doesn’t look like her. They never do. Never smile.
She is more herself captured in photos and letters
from the president. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.


Second workshop assignment in my poetry class. A much more simple narrative, compared to my sleep-writing. (Probably for the best.)