Traci Brimhall

Will & Testament

 

Before I let go, let me be awake for midnight again, the new moon 

and I both comfortable in our tenure with darkness. Before it’s over, 

I want to testify about your untrustworthy mouth, how it rushes off 

my breasts too fast, my pleasure under threat. If I get to choose 

 

an afterlife, I’d pick the one with never-ending snow for what it does 

to the silence, how it makes it easier to hear God listening. Before 

these years with you, my words were pregnant with an ugly sadness. 

Now I want a house of nights, of dialogues with owls, of homemade 

 

peanut butter ice cream and your ankle on mine. Now that there’s 

this fire, the river. Now that my body warned us of its limits, the plan. 

Now with this love, I want to answer the valentine ringing in the bottle. 

I want to drop the clock from a hot air balloon before my body ends 

 

up in a cadaver lab or a carnival ride. We celebrate my birthday by 

moving our rings to our right hands to make a happier future possible. 

I ask how long you will wait after I die to move on. You promise to 

entomb me like a pharaoh—with a chariot and fifty pairs of underwear. 

 

Resurrection has practical concerns. Bury me with one of your shirts 

in case I come back as a bloodhound. Save my favorite panties—

the pink ones—for a sexier immortality or a lonely evening. I would 

return to you as any star. Stay awake. Be ready. I’m already burning.

 

Traci Brimhall is the author of four poetry collections: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon); Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brimhall lives in Manhattan, KS and serves as the current Poet Laureate of Kansas.