The Last Request

The three of us--two sad as dogs
(halfway, then, to true sadness)--grew
convinced under the smoke-blacked
rafters. The one laid out
was convinced and convincing both,
eyes waxed shut, hands pressed
one on the other, marzipan lips;
her wish brought us here, and we came
and stood and looked at her body
and became convinced of that particular
dead-end, that cliff bottom, the little
quiet splat all our widening bottoms
were headed for. She doffed her body
and was convinced
    we would follow through,
would get her into this old, scorched,
spent shell of a church and lay her out.

It came to rain, finally, and we two
stood and watched it hit her, watched
it peck at the hole we’d dug, looked up
through the holes at the grey cast.
We rolled her into the earth and stood
and watched. Still taking up space.
An hourglass emptied of sand. A future
rhizome, if lucky. A debt we were paying,
and the smell—
    wet charred wood, funereal fluids,
pasture the next field over—was
the smell of service, and it made us
half-sad, not as though we’d loved her,
but because we could not bury her again and again.




Marc Pietrzykowski: I live in Atlanta with my wife, a dog, and an unfixed number of cats. I've had poems and essays in Versal, Diagram, Pleiades, GoodFoot, The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Red River Review, Exquisite Corpse, and a few others.



NEXT

PUT OUT LIGHTS