You’re More Graceful
Sean Cho A.
than ever. Your mother says, she wishes you
were in an urn resting atop her dresser.
Instead, I’m told your body became a home
for the gnats. Since you left
yourself laying on the back porch, there’s been living everywhere.
Just as always.
You didn’t choose this world,
your mind, or the body it floated in.
The faults of our brains are predetermined
random and unrelenting.
They are stronger
than beauty, even with those dimples on your cheeks.
I picture the wings multiplying, and feasting
on your saliva, gratefully.
You’d find joy in this. You picked this for yourself.
*
Without you, it has been January
in both directions. Bones’ decay
is the slowest of all.
*
According to history spring will come.
The earth moving towards its kinder path.
And your body will become indistinguishable with the soot.
That’s all you ever believed in.
The pleasant hum of wings above the breathing soil.
*
Your mother left your favorite summer dress
hanging in the windowsill,
the rosary stitched right under the neck line.
Sean Cho A. is a writer living in the southern United States.
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