But now it’s her stooped body in queue for the slab,
her blessed temperature you’re fiddlin’ with, and God’s
holy directive shifts accordingly. Your mother holds
the tasteful funeral home brochures an inch from her
eyes until their horrible words unblur, shakes her head
at the insane cost of the gilded, pall-borne tribute she truly
craves, asks again for whatever’s cheap. May her Lord
forgive you as you just keep shuffling that cremation info
to the top of the pile. You remember how stupidly she
bobs her napped head to the wagging finger of God,
God again, always God, how resolutely she clutches
all the bluish notes in gospel—for her, “the fire next
time” is not a frugal means of disposing of soulless
shells, it is payback for a life clawed together outside
of her savior’s cold little classroom. Oh, never you mind
the lesson she drilled into you after a handgun blasted
your father out of the world, what she said to end your
bouts of snot and fever, your worrisome new habits of
snatching tufts of hair from your own head and screaming
the onsets of dawn—Your daddy’s not in that ol’ body
anymore— and you unrolled your eyes just in time to look
that pliant, just in time to make her think you believed her.
Now that she has refused to the neat conclusion of ash,
you are thinking of all the damned reams of paperwork
glorious ceremony requires, the feel of scrawling your
name over and over to officially end her. There will be too
many syrupy, flowers draped over everywhere, the casket
lid flipped open, your oblivious mother’s vaguely
whorish makeup job. You dread the hearse’s eerie creep
through annoyed Ubers, the depressing pit, mourners
sneaking cell snaps, taking note of your absence of ache.
While this strange woman comparison-shops, zeroing in
on the pauper’s special—Girl, what is a cloth casket?—
you remember years of screaming her name into a dead
phone after she scrubbed her whole history of your needy
little face. Now that she is frail and beholding, you should
demand that she answer for that kind of love. Or you
can love that way too. Go on. Throw a match into her hair.
Copyright © 2018 by Patricia Smith. This poem originally appeared in Connotations Press/ Hoppenthaler’s Congeries, Jan. 2018. Used with the permission of the author.