by Alexis Rhone Fancher
When I buried my son I became someone else
the motherhood part written out of my script;
I should have felt lighter.
An alternate narrative ran alongside
the dead kid one where he wasn’t dead.
It remains the preferable scenario.
I buried my son and now I don’t
know who walks on eggshells the living or the dead, and sometimes I think
the dead one is me, especially when I look
in the mirror. I am coming to terms with mortality: mine/his.
I’ve dumbed down my dreams.
If you look hard enough, you’ll see the skewed trajectory, the off-track,
the fizzle. You’ll live the devastation, sip the dregs.
When my mother died, I wore a lavender dress to her funeral.
I stuffed it into the back of my closet where it lived for thirty years. When I found it
again, the dress still fit.
But I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.
— from Juniper Volume 2, Issue 3