a letter to the dead…
Hey Dad, it’s Monday again.
I’m writing from where the cold snap broke
at 39 degrees, the mountains holding their breath
like a man waiting for test results.
I wonder what sky you’re under now,
if heaven is a temperature,
a feeling of warmth after a long chill.
Mom is okay. She still watches the news,
gets angry at the world,
falls asleep to rivers on the television,
sends money to Billy Graham,
chews with teeth too loose to chew.
She smiles when you ask.
We both know what that smile costs.
K. is Ugly, Mom says—
the word hanging in the air
like an unlit cigarette.
J. is good. She suffered first, so now
the universe owes her less.
I took my suffering late.
Somebody’s thumb is on the scale.
I quit the pills cold turkey,
the family proud way.
I remember your last cigarette,
how you threw it down like a declaration,
a cold worm against the concrete.
You said, Martha, that’s the last, and it was.
I watched your last breath leave you
and enter me and Mom standing there—
a kind of inheritance.
Your granddaughter is in Tennessee now,
studying law.
They recruit first-year students like athletes.
I don’t know the legalese for hope,
but I think she’s learning it.
My PSA is 14.5.
Normal is 1 to 4.
Google says I have a fifty percent chance
of already having cancer.
When they asked, I said no.
It wasn’t a lie, just a different kind of truth.
Work is slow. The holidays are over.
Taxes wait in the shadows.
Another year is trying to become something.
Luna is blonde and small.
She is a firecracker
and a quiet burn.
We are in purgatory, waiting
for the prayers of good people
to lift us somewhere else.
You would like her. I think
you would see your son in her eyes,
trying, still trying.
Say hello to whoever’s there.
Tell them I am almost ready.
Tell them I am still learning
how to hold a cold thing
until it grows warm.
Love you to the moon and back,
then back again.
me.
BB Grey--musings 
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