Your Pale Gray Eyes
On this awful, bathrobe morning,
I wonder what you look like now.
Could your ashes fit into my coffee mug?
How about our bowl on the dish rack?
The one I bogarted the popcorn from
curled up watching “Mad Men”
when you got pissed
I listed
all the ways I’d fuck Jon Hamm?
Do you clump like dirt in Volunteer Park after this perpetual
homicidal
Seattle rain?
Or crumble like a sandcastle
trampled by my nephew
pretending he’s a Stormtrooper
someplace
there’s a beach in space?
I suppose your blue eyes burned first
turning them gray
like the rest of your remains.
A friend told me shards
survive
the crematorium’s fire.
So my guy with the perpetual boner
you left behind your bone.
A nifty little gift,
I’d rather return.
Oh, my love:
How did you burn?
Litsa Dremousis (she/her) is the author of Altitude Sickness (Future Tense Books). Seattle Metropolitan Magazine named it one of the all-time “20 Books Every Seattleite Must Read”. Her essay “After the Fire” was selected as one of the “Most Notable Essays 2011” by Best American Essays, and The Seattle Weekly named her one of “50 Women Who Rock Seattle”. She recently left the Washington Post, where she’d been an essayist who wrote extensively about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. (Fuck you, Jeff Bezos.) Her work has appeared in Esquire, Hobart, McSweeney’s, NY Mag, The Rumpus, et al.
