Eulogy For The Remains

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By Kimberly Casey

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It has been two years since you died and I realize that its almost been two years since the last time I tried to hurt myself and I wonder if this is why I can’t feel you close to me anymore. as if you knew that if your hollow ghost wandered too close I wouldn’t be able to resist trying to reach out and grab onto you.

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The day I lost you, my dear windstorm, I breathed in deeper than my lungs could catch, swallowed hard, wished for drowning. Took the rock-knocking in my chest as a sign of your presence, your vibrancy still shining out of me, a keepsake alive in my veins. I had never had to say a goodbye to love that I ever really believed would be permanent and now you can’t even hear the way my voice creaks through the cracks in my throat scratching your name in the walls of my esophagus. I don't know when I stopped writing you like a poem and started piecing together you a eulogy. I don't know why I waste energy hating myself for this rather than trying to breathe life back into you. Manic mortician - when it came, I promised I would paint the pieces of your self more beautiful than the silence of snowfall, brush stroke each sliver of your skin - you would appear untouched, quiet, safe. I spoke you like a tragedy even before you were gone but now I etch “I never saw this coming” in lace along my legs. You are the 6 new skeletons to my closet that reek fresh with rot, the recent decay of life not fully lived.

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but you helped me see. This life, walls plastered in death, has been so dreadfully, exhaustingly beautiful. The strongest days are the ones where we can continue to be gentle, not only to others, but to ourselves. Do not allow pride to swell, swallow it down dry - this is the best and most difficult medicine. We are beautifully wild. Learn to be these creatures in less damaging ways. Dull down those sharp edges of teeth. Try not to speak so much blood and skin and dark. Become an intangible thing. Attract new ghosts, but quit digging graves. We are already made up of the earth, of the soil, of the sky, and we’ll all return home someday.

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Kimberly Casey received her BFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA. She has since moved around the country and settled in Huntsville, AL, where she founded a spoken word community called Out Loud HSV. Through that community she hosts workshops, open mics, poetry slams and more in an effort to enliven the literary arts of her area. Her work has appeared in The Corvus Review, Hypertrophic Literary, and Red Fez, among others. She has one self-published chapbook of poetry titled 'Learning to Love Anchors.'

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