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POETRY

“die Trauer,” read by Betsy Baker.

die Trauer

I know grieving. I teach grieving. I help those who’ve helped those
down into their graves. I am horrified about death. And life. And
how life becomes death. And I think that’s why I turn to God in my
thin understandings. Misunderstandings. And I know I fear everything
sometimes. And nothing sometimes. As bipolar as the sea. An ex-
once said to me, Love is a pillow. No explanation. Walked away,
as if to say it would never be explained. But it doesn’t need to be.
She’s gone. She’s gone now. She once said to me: Jesus swept
one day when I wasn’t helping with the cleaning. She said: He
turned water to wine, so you can turn dirty laundry to clean.
But it wasn’t me. It was the machine. I’m lonely. Listen:
the night tonight sounds like Sleepy Hollow. The crickets
are particularly eerie. I look up at the moon and it is a heart,
full of pity. And below, the street, so full of city’s everything,
the chaos of this Detroit-Dearborn border, how even the cities
start with de-, like deconstruction, and destruction, how de-
means opposite and remove and reduce and away from and
down and wholly. And I once taught a Lit class where I got on
a tangent about the word theology, how theos means God, and
I started talking about the, saying that when we say the chair,
we’re saying God’s chair, and when we say the lamp, we mean
God’s lamp. And a student was from Germany and said they
say die for the, so that it’s die Lampe, die like death, another
student said, so that it becomes Death’s lamp and the church
is die Kirche or Death’s church, and then someone started
asking what the etymology is for the word etymology and
we were tired and it was late, and this was shortly after
the deadliest plane crash in U.S. history, so random, with
273 people killed. Chicago. We were in Chicago. And
I remember the prayer vigil. The candles. How I stood there
and thought about the word light, its many meanings —
brightness and lack of gravity and soul and how it is a verb
and a noun, and the night was all around us and I thought
of that word, the rhyme. Such a strange mind, mine. Such
an odd life. The rain came, as if to let us know that the world
wanted us finished for the night. And the rain put us out.
And on the drive home, she was quiet. She knew someone
who knew someone on the flight. The cars sped by us as if
it’s impossible for any of us to die. I prayed. To myself.

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“I work,” read by Sue Harrison.

I work

with survivors of torture, and go to a comedy class after
work and the class, for some reason, has decided I am
a pariah, and the class is white, woke, and wealthy,
largely, and many in the class don’t work, live with
their parents and watch the news and they are well-
versed in politics and comedy, except we don’t know
how to do it, a strange anger in the room, how we laugh
sometimes a little too hard, and how I am extremely
not invited, where they have parties, but I am too old,
and age discrimination is fine, certain types of bias
that are fashionable, allowed, also the only vet in
the room, and a couple other identities where it’s just
me, but not ones they are particularly interested in,
and I try to forget the day, the people I’ve seen earlier
who were tortured for their belief in God, the wrong
belief, and impossible to write about, ineffable, even
more difficult to write about than God, indescribable,
and there is such a meanness to the comedy, a sort
of humiliation, a woman in the class who’s a pastor
and how she’s, really, the angriest one of them all,
and I want to tell her that I believe too, but she is
set on ensuring I am not a part of the group, this
immense need on her part to exclude me, a thought
of my brother, when he put an ant in a jar and left it
there for weeks, how the ant died with no one wiser
for its bondage, how nothing was gained, and I quit
eventually, stop going to the class I paid for, because
the comedy isn’t. Instead I write alone now. I think
it’s easy to be evil. And, strangely, it’s easy to be
good. I think of the wind often. I look out my window
and see a series of leaves that look like footsteps.
It looks like a path, a hint, that I should follow it,
and it leads straight to the forest. I know stories of
the survivors, but I cannot share them. I keep them
to myself. I encourage their faith with fury, my voice
hoarse saying, Yes, when they tell me about joining
choir, about getting baptized, about getting their
citizenship, about getting their shadows to calm down,
to not be hypervigilant while their bodies sleep.

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“Pray for my mother and father who were,” read by Jeff Sartain.

Pray for my mother and father who were

involved in an accident, my father cutting his wrist
while working in the shower and then driving to
the hospital, bleeding, my mother in the passenger

seat, unable to drive due to her M.S., and the blood
loss got to be too much, my father passing out behind
the wheel, crashing into another car, both cars totaled,

the insurance not covering any of it, the ambulances
on the horizon, the weeks later of slow recovery,
the now of worry, the prayer for more prayer, this

sharing with you for connection, the need for need,
the want for want, the realization that there is no God
for God, the loneliness of that. How lucky we are.

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Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Iron & Wine’s “Such Great Heights.”

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Image: “Candlelight Vigil 2019-214” by Office of Public Affairs, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.com.