Audio: Read by the author.
Antigone, dead siblings
are set. As for the living,
pick me for a sister.
I, too, love a proper funeral.
Drag, Dig, and Sisters’ Pop-Up Burial.
Landlady,
I make the rounds of graves
keeping up my family’s
topnotch properties.
On a torture instrument
called an accordion
I stretch my fingers
into those of a witch.
My guts have been emptied
like bellows
for the best sound.
Once we settle your brother,
I’ll show you forests
of the unburied dead.
We’ll clean the way only two sisters
can clean a house:
no bones scattered like dirty socks,
no ashes at the bottom of kneecaps.
Why bicker with husbands about dishes
when we’ve got mountains of skulls to shine?
Labor and retribution we’ll share, not girly secrets.
Brought up by dolls and monuments,
I have the bearings of a horse and a bitch,
I’m waterproof,
I’m cement in tears.
You can spot my graves from afar,
marble like newborn skin.
Here, history comes to an end
like a movie
with rolling credits of headstones,
like a movie
with nameless credits of mass graves.
Every ditch, every hill is suspect.
Pick me for a sister, Antigone.
In this suspicious land
I have a bright shovel of a face.
