Funeral trends for an early summer
BY JORDAN HAMEL
Priests in pastel negligees singing acapella power ballads.
Biodegradable wicker baskets that house us soft as laundry.
Algal cremation for marine permaculture. Being flung naked
onto the moon’s surface with any residual household pets.
Grandchildren stitching half-mast peace flags, for the post-burial
ayahuasca ceremony. Pickling yourself in a vat of garlic brine
for later use in bloody marys, on an evening patio.
When we sat in your garden, sickly pollen glomming on
to our gin mugs, I asked what you wanted for Christmas.
You needed nothing for yourself, but you wanted your parents
to live another year—your mum’s been sick lately and your dad
won’t last long after she’s gone. She cooks and cleans, he
gathers wood, but it’s too warm nowadays, there’s a fire ban,
new carbon weighs down the birds. All of us are nesting
in the hollowed world of a burnt-out Nissan chassis,
Hollow coffins are out this summer. Solid oak only.
Bodies strapped to the outside like human sashimi.
It’s chic to watch the gradual decay, raw as shins on gravel.
When your mum went, your dad, belligerent as ever,
trudged from room to room, flicking switches off,
not favoring light, not scared, just trying to save power,
as if to say, last one out, leave it dark, just in case.
Women love me, fish fear me
BY JORDAN HAMEL
Life’s too short to eat bowfin, or that minced
pollock they batter and call Filet-O-Fish,
or the dolphins that get swept up in tuna nets
poached in a mercury brine. I often dream
of the creature from The Shape of Water, I bet
he tastes amazing with vinegar. I’m sorry. The wife
is making us go vegetarian, I’m trying, but it’s not easy.
I’ve been trawling this shoreline for centuries,
just me and my rod and my net and my
two large sons, roughhousing in the dingy
instead of learning how to properly rig
a double sliding sinker line with frozen squid chunks.
You try to teach kids the little things in this life;
you try to show them how seaweed slips through
sand and snags on rocks, how light refracts
on the water when dawn opens her eyes,
how to gut a 10 lb. snapper ass to mouth
without tainting the meat. But the youth
don’t know what they don’t know until it’s too late.
I am a decent man. I tell myself this often.
I emerged fully formed from a sea of good men.
I don’t know if god exists but if he does
I know where he’d spend his Sunday mornings.
The wife jokes that I move through life
with a bucket of bait in one hand
and a beer in the other, all smiles and salt breath
and tall tales for anyone who will listen.
She says I should slow down, take a second,
breathe. I’m not as young as I once was,
but I still have so much love to give.
