(PROSE POEM)
IN THE WAKE OF MY SISTER
CATHYRN SHEA
IN THE WAKE OF MY SISTER
CATHYRN SHEA
I haven’t been late for my own funeral yet. I flew in to my sister’s late. I don’t mean by airplane, I mean flew into the seated crowd where I was to have given her elegy, only I was late. I’d been up all night, kept up by my husband & son & daughter drinking, yelling, laughing, cursing, crammed into a room with rollaways, tripping over each other. My nagging: “Please get me to my own sister’s FUNERAL on TIME.” Well, memorial (since we’d already scattered her ashes on Monterey Bay where we’d gotten seasick, more than green around the gills when a whale breached in the wake of the boat. My three remaining sisters and I woozy. (Nancy reminding us of our maiden name: Green.) And it was after her wake I vowed I would from then on be the utmost pillar of promptness. But I am not conveying the grief that paralyzed me, her abrupt departure from an aneurysm. Time moving in a praline-hardened sepia I could not calculate.
Cathryn Shea is the author of four chapbooks, including Backpack Full of Leaves (Cyberwit, 2019), and Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree (dancing girl press, 2019). Her first full-length poetry collection, Genealogy Lesson for the Laity, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in September 2020. Cathryn’s poetry appears in New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Typehouse, and elsewhere. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.
