Recognition (second draft and still ugh)

1.

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 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 this face,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. I tug away—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.

2.

I hold my parents' hands outside. The green is bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques name
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.

3.

Just after Christmas, my grandma tells us
she wants to die. She tells good memories
about dead men and women. She is happy
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listen patiently in metal folding-
chairs and the dry, heated air. She has a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looks like herself, in every photo.
I imagine she smiles when her daughters catch her
talking to ghosts between sleeping and waking.
Her medications sit in a green plastic organizer
on a tiny metal table. We promise to visit soon.

4.

January. She was singularly ready to die.
I can see in the coffin now, her curled hair plastered
to her scalp and pulled away from her green dress.
She doesn’t look like her, is more herself in photos
and typewritten letters from the president.
No smile. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.