My best friend
clutched my fingers like an
oyster on its pink, luscious flesh,
and kissed me
once on each cheek,
in the manner of a ship forcing the sea apart when against the wind,
then shoved me excitedly to her father’s coffin,
and begun crooning to him how I’ve been a good girl,
and how my college grades were very exceptional,
with an air of a flighty tea-party mutual introduction
before giggling with the
lost, hollow smile of a drunkard.
In the kitchen,
her youngest brother
absently-mindedly whipped up a feast of
grainy meatballs,
their father’s favourite dish, he carefully explains,
with murky crow-claws etched beneath his peach-pink eyes
and a tipsy smile that reminded me of barbed wires,
before placing a bowl on the coffin
as if forcing his father to eat,
while the preacher majestically proclaimed outside,
with the red, jagged glare of the funeral lights,
about how it is God’s will to bring him,
to a better place.