Poetry |

“Death Call”

Death Call

 

3am. Dad’s voice: Get up.

Let’s go. (A school night.)

No washed face, partially

tucked shirt. We make for

the Chevy Astro at the funeral

home, drive it 80mph west

to the city, the windows down;

the wind in the empty hold

battering the metal — loud

caught there and the sound

of all the rushing deadened.

The van idles rough,

a shaking I can sleep to easy, but

it’s cold and a body is waiting for us.

The gurney has a hard latch.

I worry my hands will be frozen and unable

to release it, but all four legs fall fine.

 

She was Grandmother and matriarch.

The whole family immediately began the wake.

Couches full of bodies holding bodies

in laps and crying or eating ham

and rolls. The room smells like

gas from the old oven.

The house has settled like ours —

the ceiling and walls are veined with cracking.

I count doorways we will push through

as we navigate a woman out

of her legacy. What’s left of her

looks very quiet. Even the short gray

hairs along her lip are hushing.

We have to shut her door to reach her.

Unmake her bed and she is woman, more

than I’ve seen — in a nightie ridden up,

her genitals there, that mystery.

We wrap her in her own sheet to move

her and I remember raking, carrying leaves

in similar folds. I am slight and thankful

she’s not much bigger than I,

so the moving isn’t sweated.

We cover her completely.

If her soul leaving wasn’t enough,

now her body, too, a disappeared thing.

The doorways are all too narrow, so

we tilt the gurney with one arm

while the other holds her in place — I pray

she stays in place.

There are seven concrete steps to the lawn.

I count them aloud one by one.

I count everything so my mind doesn’t

catch grief and wear it like my own.

The wheels crunch over the frozen grass.

Her grandchildren walk beside me, beside her

like pallbearers. The wind picks up

and it hurts, how it tears through my jacket

like I’m not wearing one at all.

The grandchildren stop walking.

The wind brings them one last vision of her

that early morning — I want to burn it:

 

the sheet untangling

her gray legs

her nightie       a ribbon

      above what brought

      their mothers into the world.

 

I stand in sad-shock

while dad rearranges the sheet

without a word. Then

we move her to the van.

Lock the gurney in place.

I sit in the passenger seat, count streetlights.

She smells like she is still alive.

Dad goodbyes the family, we drive,

the windows down, the smell of her

life mixing with the dead cold.

Contributor
Seth Pennington

Seth Pennington is Editor-in-Chief at Sibling Rivalry Press. His chapbook is Tertulia, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He is editor of Stonewall 50 and Assaracus; co-editor of Joy Exhaustible; and poetry editor of Equinox. He was the recipient of the Richard Stanley Cooper Literary Award for Creative Writing. His work has been or is forthcoming from The Oxford AmericanRhino, and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his husband, Bryan Borland.

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