DEATH Poem: Lessons in fury, by Ana Maria Voiculet

The stillness of a drought day—
an instance, Lucifer smiles.
His smile is last breath,
rattling windows,
bird wings across the skin.
“Say, do you know
what a curse is?”

“I can think of an instance.”

“Tell me.”

“My mother’s mother died
on a wooden table. Her gaze
latched onto my mom’s—”

Wind trapped and twisting,
singing through wooden
cracks, creaking with storm.
We don’t say she drank, we say
the Hibiscus ate her. We don’t say
bruises – she loved lilac
blooms. Midnight-beatings, dress cut
too low at the back. We don’t say
cirrhosis. Her liver bloomed.
We say weakness.

“Is that a curse?”

“It is.” Lucifer’s laugh, the after-
image of humming wishes,
cruelly. “The women
in your family die
strange deaths.”

One, wandered the village roads,
rough, rocky. Barefoot in a night-
gown. Come light me a candle,
she said, “I’m dying.”
She died.

Another, an aunt I never met, laid out
in a pale-green kitchen.

“Bend and kiss her cheek.”
She smelled of fruit left out to boil
in the sun. Hay and sweet corn.
Pumpkin bloated on the fields.
Sunflower rot. Hands pushed me,
“Go on, go ahead. Kiss her,
kiss her.”

Liver left out
in the pale-green kitchen
blooms into lilac-colored
sunflowers. Kiss
the summer. Stillness, wings across
the skin. Sour cherry schnapps
stings the hardest
down your throat.