#embalming
After my mother died, my room was filled with roses. When the flowers died, my room was filled with their sweet, rotten stench for weeks on end; it sunk into my pores and into my DNA and years later, I still smell like dead roses.
My sister confuses this smell with dead lilies.
A bouquet of red roses was placed atop my mother’s coffin as it lowered six
feet down into the earth. After the roses died, I wonder if my mother could
smell them like I did? I wonder if she still smells them, or, more likely, how long it took for the roses to disintegrate into dust like her?
We don’t talk about the body after death because we don’t like to be reminded of how vulnerable we really are. In high school, a boy asked me to prom using roses and lilies that were all different shades of reds and oranges and yellows like fire. Lilies like funerals and tombstones and formaldehyde.
I don’t think he meant to remind me of death. I don’t think his intention was to place me in a casket similar to my mother’s with its pink padded walls. I don’t think he realized that’s where I went when I saw his basement covered in bouquets of hellfire. I think he meant the roses to be romantic,
but I looked at them and saw my mother’s putrefying face, saw her intestines eaten away by savage bacteria and bugs, saw her eyelids drying out and peeling back like black and dead and withered lily petals. Embalming does not prevent decomposition, only prolongs it. I have embalmed my mother's
memory in the shape of a teal notebook. I cannot tell if it has
begun to decay or not.
May 24, 2016
May 24, 2016 at 2:31 PM UTC
Surely a piece of me died back then,
Least I faced after it is physical pain,
Like needless needles it was stinging,
All I managed was writing a poem.
Not a regular poet but an enthusiast,
Within me someone happy had died,
I started embalming the dear & dead,
Only hoping that I shall be revived..
My dying song gave birth to a poem,
Heart for the poem healed my heart,
The poem was truly a miracle for me,
Nothing less than a potion of elixir...
Jan 3, 2015
Jan 3, 2015 at 11:29 PM UTC
I
"She's lovely . . . so natural."
A corpse pumped full of formaldehyde.
My grandmother? That prodigious maker of
pies, cakes, stuffing, and cranberry ice?
That lover of Burger King restaurants,
amusement parks, presidential elections, and long summer rides?
Her flushed face is like stone.
This body is a mockery of her being.
(Her fearless motion is done.)
II
She gave us life.
Crass, fond, willful. She gave us life
like turkey and stuffing.
She is the answer to our dark questionings.
Sep 28, 2018
Sep 28, 2018 at 10:32 AM UTC
No longer a thought
within my brain,
the mortician lay me
down to sleep
a scream i refrained
surfaced as white
within my eyes
that none had bought
my vitals he checked
and thumped my nose
as a creep
then:
a bath and massage
no dance but song
two strong hands
then set my face
arterial embalming
then drain/eject
it's all the same
the cavity --
aspirate and concentrate
The humming thrumming
burning desire
escaped as soon as with
a pop I fled my skin
and faced the choice
to do it once again.
:: 10-23-2018 ::
Oct 23, 2018
Oct 23, 2018 at 10:26 PM UTC