OBIT [The Blue Dress]
The Blue Dress—died on August 6,
2015, along with the little blue flowers,
all silent. Once the petals looked up.
Now small pieces of dust. I wonder
whether they burned the dress or just
the body? I wonder who lifted her up
into the fire? I wonder if her hair
brushed his cheek before it grew into a
bonfire? I wonder what sound the body
made as it burned? They dyed her hair
for the funeral, too black. She looked
like a comic character. I waited for the
next comic panel, to see the speech
bubble and what she might say. But her
words never came and we were left
with the stillness of blown glass. The
irreversibility of rain. And millions of
little blue flowers. Imagination is having
to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is
wearing a dead person’s dress forever.
Copyright © 2018 by Victoria Chang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My mom passed away in 2015 of pulmonary fibrosis, and she had been ill for a long time. When she died, it hit me pretty hard, much harder than I ever would/could have imagined. Nearly a year later, I felt an urge to write some of these ‘OBITs’ because I felt everything around me had died. We picked a nice dress for her for the funeral. I often wonder what happened to that dress and wish I could have it back. It was a dress with blue flowers. The line ‘Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future’ was inspired by Richard Siken’s line ‘I live in someone else’s future’ from War of the Foxes.”
—Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang
