Originally published on December 3, 2021 on the now-defunct Best American Poetry blog. Republished in The Trouble Clef.
If I were dead, I wouldn’t want to stay around. I would fly to some other realm where I would no longer be myself but everything else at the same time. A happy, joyful radiance of a realm.
But I wouldn’t be able to jump there if my heart was too heavy with worry for my loved ones who are still living in this world. I would have to stay around to see how they are coping. The living become the responsibility of the dead. Maybe, if I stayed around, I could still help them somehow.
My dead grandparents and their parents and the parents of their parents und so weiter slightly move their invisible bodies making room for the new arrivals. They watch how I write these lines in English – the language they never spoke and slightly shake their heads.
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