Self-Portrait in a Coffin
“In its full emptiness emptying itself out”
– Sleigh
I look at myself looking at my coffin, oddly, the day after I’ve died.
The coffin’s empty and I know it isn’t actually empty——
rather, what was in it has become me, and in the dream
(of what’s left and what’s leaving after death)
absence is absolution, allowance for the soul to confront mourning.
My uncle is crying and that’s strange,
not because he’s not a crier but he’s lived longer than me,
a witness not only to passing but to his mother
lighting a match under my piss-drunk-grandfather
passed out in the recliner:——
this, seared into DNA and afterlife
and it all seems why my uncle survives
despite stone liver and fatty tissues.
The children have gathered, the fathering children
and wrinkling loves, they wait beside my emptiness with pity
for what I’ve left behind—(husbands are meant to die first).
Despite them I think of mother raising children:
scolding adolescents that severed orchid buds with Nerf bullets,
admonishments nothing more than placing limb
on kitchen table; our placing the end in a shot glass
to hope and wait, over days and weeks,
for that just darkened green to unfurl rivulets
and root itself in water, but nothing bloomed,
only browning, and emptiness,
the cup waiting in the sink for someone to wash it,
as I wait in this dream at my funeral for mother
to come through the doors.
.
Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo is the author of Epilogue to Paradise, a Letras Latinas-ILS/ND- Andres Montoya Poetry Prize Finalist, C&R Press 2022 Poetry Award Longlist, and an honorable mention in the Southern Collective Latin American Chapbook Competition. A MVICW Poet & Author Fellow, and the winner of the Shandy Hill Essay Contest. Ryan holds an Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education, an M.F.A. in poetry from Hunter College, and a B.F.A. in Poetry and Literature from Emerson College. Ryan’s poetry has been published in Ibbetson Street Press, Heavy Feather Review, Indolent Books, and elsewhere.
.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 