Pathetic Fallacy

When it became impossible to speak to you

due to your having died and been incinerated,

I sometimes held the uncradled phone

with its neat digits and arcane symbols (crosshatch,

black star) as if embedded in it

were some code I could punch in

to reach you. You bequeathed me

this morbid bent, Mother.

Who gives her sixth-grade daughter

Sartre’s Nausea to read? All my life,

I watched you face the void,

leaning into it as a child with a black balloon

will bury her countenance

either to hide from

or to merge with that darkness.

Small wonder that still

in the invisible scrim of air

that delineates our separate worlds,

your features sometimes press toward me

all silvery from the afterlife, woven in wind,

to whisper a caution. Or your hand on my back

shoves me into my life.