i didn’t say a word when my mother died.
words fell softly on sheets in a voice
like hospital whispers, graveyard shift gossip, the patter
of eyelids drooping and bursting open
before the nurses went home. we didn’t go home.
the nurses folded words into bleached sheets
before they went home, the sound
of counting creases like a lullaby until
she fell asleep, and the sheets were smooth.
i didn’t count her last words.
i can’t remember if there were any, or
if it was just the end of an echo,
the last ripple forgetting
how opaque the water is,
how glassy it looks,
how another sound will break it.

death kept me like a secret
hushed inside its throat,
light glittering beyond the teeth
and words rippling past me:
all the glamor of life rushing
around my body like traffic, my body
as cigarette ash flicked from a window
and suffocated by tires—or
my body as broken furniture,
discarded on the side of the road.
people drive by without noticing.
glamor reeks of gasoline.

my voice is an exoticism,
something i don’t recognize. it sounds
like furniture splintering on concrete.
i have forgotten how
to accent small talk; the syllables taste
like smoke, exhaust fumes, the bleach
nurses poured on her sheets in the morning.
i keep death’s secret like an artifact:
my mouth—a museum,
and at the edge of my throat a glass box
displaying a piece of my voice:
my mother is dead.

we clean out her room,
and i clean out my chest
to make room for storage. i pack
frayed and discolored photographs,
the hollow body of her long-dead cactus,
the shriveled blooms that cling to it.
i take telephone numbers scrawled
on post-it notes: oncologists, radiologists,
old friends, the anonymous.
i wonder if she ever called.
i peel my lungs from the lining of my chest
and hide crates of her in between;
their edges lean into my breath.

no one asks about the lilies
i keep on my desk. i keep them
in a glass box buried in my jaw
with a plaque: lilies are for funerals,
a sign of eternal life. i took one
from the casket after my mother died.
on mornings i hear the traffic outside,
i peel away pieces of the petals,
crush them between my fingers
until the lily’s white throat is gone, nothing
to hide the stem, and my hands
cup underneath to catch
the sap, dripping, breaking slow and gentle
as lips closing
around hospital whispers,
reeking like gasoline.