Become a Featured Author in Our Next Anthology

The choir rows curved like a kidney

bean. Requiem is the sound of my

heart-throat filtering absence. I am not

used to being alone. I want to hum-

home my sisters. All I see is where

you aren’t: Nyx Espresso smudged

on the rim of your Taco Bell straw.

The ice-thaw half-chunked in the sink 

drain. New cup to recycle. The last

curve of your body-imprint in 

the mattress pad. Your phantom

flip-flops by the door. The anchor-

sink of your spoon in Mom’s grits. 

The tremble of her pinky finger when 

she calls to ask about college. I miss

your black-blue hair dye in the trash

can. The leftover tint in the bowl.

The dome of your hands over my 

cheeks. How I tried to shape my

lips into yours. I sing to feel closer

to you. The pinks of our mouths

holding out a whole note. We are left

loving

I ate playdoh once. When I was a kid and Mama was still teaching the littles. She hunched over the stove with a box of strawberry cake mix and a hot pot of oil and salt. It smelled like the real deal. Mama schlupped the warm pile of pink onto the table and it was the temperature of fresh bread, the scent of strawberry jam just strained of seeds. By the end of the year, it will have gathered so much oil, dirt, and sand from the playground it becomes gutterwater grey, but right now, it is the color of laffy taffy. The grease of it stuck to my hands, and I could only play on the plastic cutting boards used for dicing fruit. I do not remember rolling it between my palms or pressing cookie cutters, but I do remember how the gleam of it clung to my hands. Mama tells me it must’ve smelled too good, and that is why I gnashed it between my molars. Mama says I sputtered and pushed it away, sliding the cutting board to her and scraping my tongue against my teeth. Mama says it melted into the cracks and crevices of my toddler mouth, choking me with salt every time I swallowed. She held me against her clavicle—the collarbones I used to rev like a motorcycle—and carried me to the sink. I don’t know how we got those stubborn bits out. These days, I shave my till they’re freckled pink and eat the crusts on every piece of toast. I gather the littles for snack time. I move three hours South. But Mama still calls me to her lap if something is stuck in my throat and I can’t swallow it down. When I’m in town, we sit on the back porch. We compare the back of her hand to mine.  I imagine her as the sweet playdoh we made, her perfume the strawberry cake mix, the creases of my palm and fingers fossilized in her giving skin. She becomes the shape of my missing. Daddy calls us in for dinner, and when I stand, I see the seam of my shorts branded into the top of her thigh. Pink indentations webbed like an open, greasy palm.

I remember Dad in the abstract. His crumpled jacket by the laundry bin, heavy jean, smoke-smell and damp with work. The calluses on his palms, round and thick like cigarette butt burns. The buzz of his voice against the crown of my head, how I felt the sound through my hair, without edges, as he read me poetry. What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Dad petted my back to wake me, and he was smoky, blurred at the edges in pre-dawn light. Before work, he pressed a kiss to my forehead and this is how I remember him, the outline of his chapped lips, the crows feet by his eyes, cracked desert sand.

In death, Dad appears in the abstract. He becomes shapes and colors.