That Which Dies
Amanda Brahlek When Grandpa died, my father sat beside him in a chair. He heard the curl of breath tighten to a knot that shook in Grandpa’s throat. It was not like a choked-off chorus of crickets rising from the corn field. It was more like a tangle of snot that lurched and shrank as his breath escaped. - When Jesus died, he rose again on the third day like a beam of lightning. Or at least that’s what the tall man in a pink shirt with lizard-eyes told me in Sunday school. - My brother is not dead, but I cannot describe his breath, nor would he want me to. - When Lauren died, everything darkened like the world had been dipped in water. Her mother cried into my neck. Her brother cried into my lap. Everything was wet. When Lauren died, I lost my breath and could not cry. - When my garden dies, I find lady bugs and blame them. I blame them for not being the color of a lizard’s throat. I blame them for the tiny beads of eggs that outline the stems and leaves that have been gnawed to ragged ears. - Come die with me as we dance through brown and yellow grass. We’ll dance down to the Gulf where even the sea is starving. Where it swallows our feet in its fetid brown gullet. Let’s die together beneath a cloud of white egrets. - When the skin on my thigh died, it turned black as a prune and dry as jerky. I hid it beneath gauze, until the doctor peeled it back to snip the threads that stitched me. His glasses remained pointed at the anoxic flap of skin while his eyes rolled up towards my own. He turned to his scalpel to cut the death away. He said I’d need a graft if the seaweed would not take. - Look at the bodies that die for our own. The melon severed from its stem to be sliced by the slurp of a blade. Its seeds scraped free, gutted in a tangle of sweet slime. The cows led into the slaughterhouse, eyes like glazed figs, dreaming of dandelions and canals that run all the way to the sea. The reef calcifies to moon-stone and the fish choke on fresh water. Their gills bleed like lizard throats. These bodies, your body, our bodies are dying every day. - When my car died outside of a Mexican dance club, it spewed coolant over the asphalt. It gagged on its own sizzled neon that steamed over the hot metal engine. When I popped the hood, the sweet exhaust plumed around me. The smell and tickle in the back of my throat has never left. - To kill fleas, you must soak the hound in dish soap then dust him with borax. The red in his eyes means it’s working. - When the attraction died, Eric and I stopped having sex. We simply lay beside one another like cows two-deep at the slaughterhouse. - As kids, we killed lizards and frogs without mercy. The frogs disintegrated down to bone-clippings in bowls of bleach. They looked like frogs made of moon. The lizards weren’t so lucky. - When your cell phone signal dies, you become more aware of death, especially on the Natchez Trace, inside your orange and gray tent squatted between pines and bare maples. Yet, the moans of branches help you sleep. The murmur of mosquitos keeps you restless. - When I sleep, it’s like dying, but the buzz in my head does not stop. Someone turn the static off. - Maples do not die from metal piercings. They heal like humans. Like humans, they weep. The difference is that their tears and blood smell of damp dirt and honey, ours smell like the ocean. - When my cat died, I heard nothing, but imagined the clatter of antlers ringing through the vet’s office, through the nearby woods, rattling the lizards from their holes, slightly tickling the innards of the trees. - Once, on TV, I saw a boy shoot his dog. I was four and didn’t understand why he had to do it. The shotgun blast sounded like the spat of life from my dad’s VW bus. Death was a sound bigger than my ears. - When Grandma died, the breath galloped through the dark of her room, over her floral bedspread, and caught on the ceiling fan, raining down on her new husband. The slight stir did not wake him. |
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About the Author: Amanda Brahlek left the orange groves of her childhood to live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where raindrops weigh as much as ducklings. She attends McNeese State University as an MFA candidate in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Cossack Review, Vector Press, and Coastlines Literary Magazine. Her work is also forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Review and 3Elements Review. She is the winner of the 2016 Allison Joseph Poetry Award through the Crab Orchard Review.