M.P. Armstrong
sixteen pages of obituaries in the boston globe
and we still have no idea what we would write in ours,
or where we’ll publish when the local paper is listed
among the dead. we have read books where obituaries
disappear, replaced by a list of names on the radio, the
dead reduced to two words and we are never sure if that
is just for sheer numbers’ sake or because anyone who
could have given more detail—their job, their hobbies,
their favorite band—is also dead. where headstones
are replaced by carvings in airplane trays that have
shed euphemisms—joined her lord and savior, fought
a valiant fight, passed away suddenly or quietly at home
or both—in favor of the shorter, simpler “died,” and nothing
matters, not the place you were born or the headstone
you were planning to buy, just the date that you died.
we want more than that. maybe we will start up a nightly
howl of grief, of names released into the night to mourn.
maybe we will sew our eulogies into masks with enough
thread to describe that day at the beach, where she was
more alive than the waves, or the gift he bought you for
your birthday and you suspected he could read your mind.
and for the newspaper, we might carry old editions to
the steps of the statehouse, brandish them like shields
among the protestors, or hang them in the window
next to the american flag in the hopes that someone
driving by will notice the irony. that is, if anyone is still
driving. that is, if anyone is still fighting the valiant
fight, not yet absorbed into the closest sixteen pages.
—Submitted on 04/25/2020
M.P. Armstrong‘s work has appeared in Traveling Stanzas, The Mass, The Cabinet of Heed, Silver Birch Press, Social Distanzine, and other journals. A student at Kent State University, they are managing editor and reporter for Curtain Call and Fusion magazines. Online at mpawrites at on Twitter @mpawrites.
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