Joe Pan’s newest collection of poems, Hiccups, will be published by Augury Books in September.
Not all were very well-cleaned, & the finer dust of dispersing grouped grandparents rode the stale air together to lionize the glinting mournful eyes of mourners who filtered in tilted lines into my uncle’s modest mortuary, a fortune of respectable debilitation on parade, arms wrapped tight about their gilded rentals, those renewable casings of woe, the absence of their loved ones an aftertaste I sought to banish with bitter sourdough & crudités, a downturned gaze & ionized water. I had worked in retail & was not afraid. Even when their eyes came unfastened. Even when they barked up that gorgeous sultry porridge of sound the living make when unwound by suffering. When unwound, & rewound, & unwound by suffering. No urn is colder than an urn returned, except those perhaps that aren’t. I smile as I tip the urn lips from their pleading palms, their regretful palms, their shaking fingernails catching with a scratch the metal bottoms as they grasped back, slightly late. We let go, only to wonder & wrestle with regret, & then we let goer. I’ve done this dance a hundred times but most oftenly with words. All investments are eventually divested, I whispered to each of them, & this seemed to help, as the line curved back out through the narrow double doors. Beside me my uncle bowed to each mourner, lower each time. He had a loose vertebra that clicked as he bent, & this was how we kept time…before, of course, it fixed itself. But for a while there, nobody felt forgotten, finally. We were all in it together. & afterwards, smoothies.
Joe Pan’s newest collection of poems, Hiccups, will be published by Augury Books in September.
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AuthorHi. I'm Joanna Fuhrman. This is a prose poetry/flash fiction blog in conversation with my serial prose poem "The Year of Yellow Butterflies" (The Year Of Yellow Butterflies, Hanging Loose Press 2015). I had fun writing these poems about fads and trends from imaginary pasts. If you would like to add your own section, write me and I can post it (along with a short bio). Start with "It was the year...." Categories
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