Learning My Place
My family is coming back
and all because my son
fell in love in Mexico.
His wife has been up since dawn
crimping paper marigolds,
baking bread crowned with bony fingers,
molding skulls cast in sugar.
Now, my mother in a peach dress,
my father in a ’70s plaid sport coat,
my brothers capped and gowned
are framed shoulder to shoulder
with loved ones they didn’t know
on a sad gay altar.
May they rest in peace
but not tonight
on this Day of the Dead
when we tempt them with food
to wake from the dirt
and follow their hollow noses
to a porch in a Texas suburb.
At sunrise
I find my daughter-in-law
tossing the leftovers
in black bags,
humming.
I kiss her cheek
and go home,
stack my mother in peach,
my father in plaid,
my brothers in regalia
in a chest next to me
in a sunhat.
.
Tina Williams is a writer living in Round Rock, Texas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Amethyst, Green Ink, As It Ought To Be, Quartet Journal, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 