Dan A. Cardoza
Loss moves mountains even buried in snow. It’s a seasonal
show for the living, dressed in trendy black. Bring your dead
it’s winter time, love. We are never alone.
I have support of a hospice worker or so-called Death Doula.
She can make you eat distraction like MM’s, and guffaw at
her gallows humor. I am so impressed, Jesus, she cooks dying
like raw microwave casserole. I eat it with bad manners.
We are convinced he’s talking to Elvis, who somehow learned
to croon on the ceiling. He loops a-hunk, a hunk of burning
love. Unimpressed, Herr Nurse says the funeral director will
help me bathe and groom the deceased now nameless, all
because
time grows death like weeds. When done, I close the laced
window, his melody gone because even the wind is done with
my father’s song. ‘It’s winter time love,’ Just rusty crepe paper
lyrics, rustling its guiro leftover leaves in the dawn.
Someone light the damn fire we need a pyre to burn the
kindling of guilt and indifference, or just because it’s perfectly
cold. Ashamed of my detection of living, I’ll fit as tight as a
shadow into a midnight glove, and conjure tomorrow a Mardi
Gras, obliged to don a Fat Tuesday mask.
***
Dan A. Cardoza has an MS Degree in Education from UC, Sacramento, Calif. He is the author of four poetry Chapbooks, and a new book of fiction, Second Stories. Recent Credits: 101 Words, Adelaide, Australia, California Quarterly, Chaleur, Cleaver, Confluence, UK, Dissections, Door=Jar, Drabble, Entropy, Esthetic Apostle, Foxglove, Frogmore, UK, High Shelf Press, Poetry Northwest, Rue Scribe, Runcible Spoon, Skylight 47, Spelk, Spillwords, Fiction Pool, Stray Branch, Urban Arts, Zen Space, Tulpa, Australia and Zeroflash.