The first time I had ever seen anything dead was when I was six and it was my pet guinea pig whose tiny simplistic life was snuffed out like a candle between the cool bars of it’s cage,
Both eyes were open to the world, yet emitted nothing and acted as a blank slate to my horror,
I renounced god, refused to say my prayers to a lord who would maliciously partake in such a betrayal while my knees fastened themselves to my chest and my lungs rattled like dented tin cans,
My dad buried her one afternoon in a dirt caked field behind a grocery store.

The first time I had ever seen a dead person was at my grandmother’s funeral,
The small private room adorned with appropriate black curtains smelled sweet in a way that caused the bile to sting your esophagus and your heart to capsize,
Her downy hair, sparsely covered her scalp like an infant was brushed methodically,
Her cheeks hollow and creased like worn leather was dusted with rouge as if to fake vitality.

She was nestled in the casket like a fetus in the womb, and I reached the conclusion that entrances and exists in and out of the belly of existence are practically identical,
We are birthed shrouded in darkness and eventually, we return to it,
The orbital of existence, the ring of life, the perpetual echo of breath,
Like tides enduringly slinking towards the shore, it gives only to erode away.

I ran away from the casket renouncing life like it was a fixed game,
And spent the funeral, picking beats out from the dull thudding of my thoughts trying to penetrate my numbness and scraped the fresh wax off the pews with my fingernails,
The coffin was as white as a tooth,
White is an archetype for purity, and maybe we are, as if tears are a substitute for holy water.

Flowers, freshly cut and arranged rested beside her,
Just like her, dead and arranged.