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| A perfume I saw in Lush the other day. The description reads: "Death & Decay. Let it transport you to a serene space where the fullness of beauty and its inevitable decay can be contemplated without fear." |
The sun is hidden behind the clouds, and yet she still divulges her presence in subtle things-- the freckles on my sister's face, the flowers who strain their thin green necks towards the sky. I am sick of the sun and the summer, so I play Nina Simone and pretend it is autumn, swathing myself in sweaters and coats.
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an excerpt:
"Today we are going to the funeral home. I am to read a poem at the service (thankfully, not one of my own) and so I powder my face, put on a pretty dress and try my best to conceal the blood-shot ellipse on my throat. The white powder makes the hickey feel more obvious than ever, like a ghost wearing a white sheet. I have never been good at make up. Online, it says to use a green concealer, and so I paint my throat with emerald eyeshadow, which is useless. It feels fucking absurd that I'm spending the hours before this funeral trying to cover up a hickey.
My throat paunches and contracts. The bloated, croaking vocal sac of a frog. Tiddalik."
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another excerpt:
"I wore sneakers to my grandmother's funeral and I feel guilty about it."
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Grief reconfigures the brain, re-informs memories, resets thought patterns and neural pathways. Grief is the chasm between is/was. Grief is painful unlearning/relearning. A brand new type of punctuation for everything you've ever written.
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Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.
| — | Anna Kamienska (trans. Clare Cavanagh) in Industrious Amazement |
