The week you died
BY KIRSTEN SHU-YING CHEN
We left the moonroof open
and it stormed all night
Nearly totaled the car
Aunt Jo stayed awake for four days straight
chain-smoking pot
and taking care of all of us
Your IV felt so uneventful
Your feet were wrapped in sheepskin
We left the moonroof open
and the rain came in
Nance poured the wine
and Em brought a cake for Jesse’s 34th
It read happy worst birthday ever in blue frosting
You loved a party so we had one
We got into bed with you
spilled red wine
combed your matted hair
The last thing you ate
was a heart-shaped dove chocolate
–dark. I forget
what the tinfoil quipped on the inside
I remember your half-open mouth
All I could eat was pork roll and cheese
All I could do was little bits of drugs
I slept in a room with no windows
I became a doorway elsewhere
I became a good girl in my grief
making detailed lists of everyone
who came by with cards or food or flowers
Crocodile rock kept playing and playing
I thought it was so funny
how the dogwood tree shook to the chorus
I thought it was so honest
how you left at dead low
went out with the tide
We left the moonroof open
and the rain came in
It was May
I thought: thou mayest
The last thing you ate was sweet
The last thing you said to me was
you’re a hoot
The week’s joys include
BY KIRSTEN SHU-YING CHEN
Opium incense at the only open gas station and the victory of not peeing my pants. Early November. The leaves now mostly fallen. The dead now freer to roam. Sunlight making wishbones of the trees—and since then what hasn’t been granted? Hot breakfast. Wild turkeys at the window fanning the woods ancestral and iridescent. There was the way I forgave myself and how my grief moved around the cabin of my heart, welcome as morning fire. Oh, and the invention in the sky I mistook at first for magic, and the orange-gold American bittersweet tucked in on itself like a scroll. I remember the man who fixed my shade and the man at the antique store, retired and shopping behind his wife’s back, making accomplices out of all of us. A porcelain white sculpture of a woman’s head, origin unknown. Why hide the things you love? There was my brisk walk home and only a little fear. Sparkling pink readers left on a table. I sipped honeyed white wine and stared at a steeple. Mom, you were everywhere.
