Advice for a Newly Dead Mother
It’s not a proper departure
if you keep reappearing,
rapping at the mirror,
squeezing into strangers’ laughs
like a divorcée wriggling into
last decade’s Little Black Dress.
Best to keep a light touch,
a split-second image in a store window,
a framed photo of you and your sons
knocked off the wall. Your youngest
finds it in the morning, picks up
the shards of glass with his fingertips,
cuts himself on a smaller piece,
the blood of his thumb stamping
a red topography on your face.
For weeks he keeps the broken frame
on his night stand. Every morning
he mutters to himself: today
I’ll get a new one; every night
he goes to bed thinking of you,
thinking: tomorrow, tomorrow.
This is the grief you want,
a presence amidst the day
and its litany of absences,
a wound in a place
prone to reopening.
if you keep reappearing,
rapping at the mirror,
squeezing into strangers’ laughs
like a divorcée wriggling into
last decade’s Little Black Dress.
Best to keep a light touch,
a split-second image in a store window,
a framed photo of you and your sons
knocked off the wall. Your youngest
finds it in the morning, picks up
the shards of glass with his fingertips,
cuts himself on a smaller piece,
the blood of his thumb stamping
a red topography on your face.
For weeks he keeps the broken frame
on his night stand. Every morning
he mutters to himself: today
I’ll get a new one; every night
he goes to bed thinking of you,
thinking: tomorrow, tomorrow.
This is the grief you want,
a presence amidst the day
and its litany of absences,
a wound in a place
prone to reopening.
Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Electric Literature, Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, and Jellyfish Review.
“Advice for a Newly Dead Mother” centers on my long-standing relationship with the grief that followed my mother’s passing. Who wouldn’t want to tell their grief how better to fold into their life? But grief is too stubborn to listen.
“Advice for a Newly Dead Mother” centers on my long-standing relationship with the grief that followed my mother’s passing. Who wouldn’t want to tell their grief how better to fold into their life? But grief is too stubborn to listen.