First, her younger brother OD’d; he died
in bed, alone, and then her remaining brother
had a fatal heart attack in the park,
and lay for hours, mistaken
for homeless. She, my best childhood
friend, was overrun with cancer—
her husband, too—a few months later.
I remember when neither of us understood
death as anything other than a brief
disappearance, and we once held a funeral
for one of her dolls, one of mine
pretend-sailing from Tiramisu, an Italian
island, I thought, with a red steamer trunk,
full of poodle skirts and sheaths.
My doll, I imagined, was a journalist
there. The following week, we found
her funeral doll under the couch, no worse
for the homilies. I wrote letters to my dead
grandmother on my best bluebird-bordered
stationery, anticipating she’d return,
like the doll. I’d never seen a bluebird;
I’d never seen a dead person. This year,
a friend built bluebird boxes, and when I visit,
I watch them nest, secure inside their homes,
from her living room windows. I’ve heard
they return to breed in the same places.
I see so much I never saw before.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 6.
Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book and a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City and can be reached at www.susanahcase.com.
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