The Bird

The morning I leave to visit my grandmother, now two fentanyl patches closer to death, a bird rests on my front step. The thrush, the color of a once-buried lemon, lies still on its side as if its bones are its own death home. The animal has always been prepared for the end. The omen, rigid beside a smattering of winterberries, couldn’t be more obvious. Death is in the air. Are dead animals good luck, or is it just bird droppings on a shoulder that bring some future reward?

When I reach for my grandmother, now dazed in her chair, nothing feels lucky; it feels too late to get forgiveness for my recent distance. Her bedroom is clogged with body heat from family in quiet panic. The window is open and the table fan puts in effort, but I still look for comfort. I keep my hand on her shoulder until the connection heats us so unbearably that I reach under the blanket to hold her cool fingers. I haven’t called this year, but I’m here, now that she’s unresponsive. She’s in and out, mumbling no when my aunts asks if anyone needs something from the store. She knows she will fly before tomorrow’s breakfast.

The Plane

My grandpa died in a plane crash when my grandmother was 31. The mechanism was tortured by an unexpected snow storm and went down. After ten days of searching, the recovery unit found the plane lodged in Wyoming mountains with no survivors.

The Body

I get a call from an aunt a few days after my grandmother passes. Do I want one of those miniature urns filled with a cocktail of my grandmother’s limbs that I could keep in the closet or on the mantel. No, thanks for asking, but I don’t want one. The body means nothing. I want to say this on the phone. The body is just a tool that helped my grandmother love and care and tend and all of the other things the darkness of the world has made us forget how to do, though we are all born into the same instrument. She’s not in the urn, I want to say, not the real her. You have her tool under that pewter lid. You have her hammer, her toothbrush, the cart she used to haul groceries to her second floor apartment. How will these things bring you close to her, I want to ask, but don’t. I know some people are attached to the body.

Me, I can’t wait to get rid of mine. Who’s going to want these old bones? I won’t be able to help anymore. I won’t be able to come to your house after a rough 1 a.m. break-up, I wouldn’t even be able to get my neighbor’s mail while they’re on vacation. What I’ll have to offer is already out there, tucked in memories or tied down to a page. But me, I’ll be ether.

It costs a lot to burn a dead body. The average price for cremation in America is $4,000. That’s $4,000 to let a stranger shove your helpless vessel in a flame-filled chamber and then grind your remains into ashes, as if to be certain you are truly dead. How funny, to not settle for the first ending, but to give more space, time, and heat, to sprout another; the poet’s way.

The Knife

When three of my cousins and I prepared my grandmother for what would be her last night of sleep, we locked the bedroom door to keep our focus (eight small children erupting in the living room) while we hoisted her from her chair with the belt around her waist, over to the bed. We applied dressings and creams that were surely not enough to erase her pain as she grimaced on the mattress. Partway through our efforts, as we hovered over her bed like participants in a touch-and-feel exhibit at a natural history museum, the door opened and we turned curiously to see one of our aunts standing there, somehow having conquered the lock. There she stood in the doorway, holding a butter knife as casually as if it were a bouquet and she had just asked us to prom. At first I was surprised to see the knife and that the utensil actually picked the lock, but why shouldn’t there be a blade in a room filled with pain?

The Towel

The olive bath towel on my door hook waits for me, with all of its form in droop. I’ll wash you today, a phrase repeated throughout the month. The sag stares back at me like a reflection, almost threatening me to alter what gravity has spent days perfecting.

The Music

After my grandmother passes, a little embarrassment sneaks out of my eyes. Now that she’s beyond me, my grandmother can see every inch of my pain. All my problems, my stupid little problems are public information for her to magazine through. She can spend her afternoons flipping through my darkness as entertainment since there’s nothing she can do about it anymore. I hope she doesn’t linger like I do. It’s not worth it. I’m horrified she now knows all of the pebbles I turn into problems. Pebbles that others step on and don’t return for, but I string and drag them behind me. I won’t let myself forget damage. And now my grandmother knows I behave so destructively. It humiliates, how she knows I torture myself with weight of the past, but at least she can see I try to turn the burdens into music when I lift the pebbles, shake them in my hand like dice, and begin to take chances.

The Yellow Rose

At my grandmother’s burial my father, aunts, cousins, and I are each given a yellow rose from a Fort Snelling employee with salt and pepper hair who’s likely distributed more flora than he can recall. It’s a hot September, and each flower sits in its own test tube of water that I wish I could flick at the back of my neck because I know the rose is nothing but temporary. I can’t recall when we were supposed to give up the blossom and offer it to my grandmother’s fragments, only that eventually I made it back to my car and was the only one still holding a stem. I placed it in the backseat, not in the mood for confrontation.

Three months later, I find my grandmother’s favorite flower fallen on the floor on top of my air compressor and broken windshield scraper. The bloom is hidden just under the passenger seat until I pull the flaking sun closer. The color is surprisingly strong and it’s easy to recall the beauty of its prime. At the stem I check the prickles. I guess I’m curious what more pain might feel like. The barbs are dull, more like a canine tooth than a needle looking for blood. They mostly annoy, their potential for damage has faded with the passing of October and November. Not knowing what to do with the beyond-parched token, I set the rose on the backseat again where I’m sure to notice it a few more times and remember that my grandmother isn’t in her green chair reading a murder mystery anymore, but under a slab of marble. In the future, when her absence pangs me, I don’t imagine I’ll look for her there.

The Bird II

Before I left my grandmother on her final night, when my cousins and I carried her to the bed, she had to be flipped from side to side on the mattress. Pads had to be placed between her and the sheet. I rolled her onto her right side and pulled her towards me. We had no choice but to be close. She lay there, eyes closed like they had been all day, moans barely present through the drugs. I gently set her on her back once my cousins finished dabbing ointment. I took my hands off her bare back and fixed her gown. My hands smelled like bandages and creams and her.

When my dad would come home after his annual fishing trip in August, my grandmother would go back home after watching over me, and I would lie on the floor of the spare bedroom because it smelled like the week of her and I would cry. My grandmother, living without my grandpa for fifty years, always appeared to me as a singular force, so much so that it’s jarring to even picture her in a pair, and yet all I wanted was to cling to her.

When I returned home after seeing my grandmother for the last time, I parked in the driveway and navigated the sidewalk in the dark. To my surprise the thrush still lay there on the unforgiving cement. No larger creature carried it away while I was gone. What could I do for the bird, already fallen, all pain extinguished? It was all I could do not to slide a green leaf under her wing.

John Muellner is an LGBT writer from suburban Minnesota, currently in the thick of attaining his MA from the University of St. Thomas. His poems can be read online in Gertrude Press, Watershed Review, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.