I lay where the grass dips between burial plots, my hip fits right in the groove. Separating effaced tablets, between grave, stone faced bed-mates, I am a frayed red ribbon book-mark—claiming her space, the living between the dead. They tell me I can’t stay here all night. I need to get used to sleeping in my own bed, but they don’t know how beds haunt me, how beds are more like coffins for me, how I’m more alive here with ivy curling in between the toes of my finally still feet.
Too heavy to stand I roll over each mound, with each twirl I push my face deeper into the ground and when I am right on top of them I pause to face them. Words don’t need to be spoken, they are written, the veins in my eyes, they crawl out onto my cheeks into the soil moistening the sockets of their skulls where marigolds will grow. “Just this once” one concedes. I bed down in the moss and the spiral strands of my hair land among the flower-weeds.
I rest my head on prayer, my worries are strung on cramped bent fingers reaching for a pen. The morning fog stretches like an opaque plastic bag over my face. I mouth Hail Mary but am signing my poems, omens for the coming of the queen.
Slams and clicks beneath my fingertips, aisles and rows of embossed tablets, each say my name. This is the altar where I lay to rest my dead, this is the place where I will live.
