Kirsten Kaschock’s A Beautiful Name For a Girl was the Rumpus Poetry Book Club’s January selection. You can read the book club’s interview of her here, and you can find an extended bio at her webpage at Ahsahta Press.
Why I Did Not Make Love to Your Dead Body
Shouldn’t it be romantic
to think to take you
in that final, leaden state
—slowed mercury? Yet,
coming upon your corpse
excited me not
to love—but to something
akin to autism. I was a rock
that dream, swaying.
No lie—I’ll
cradle you after
death if I am able, babble
and coo into your neck
as if you were my
boy—some young
thing-I-made. But last night
in the dendrite grove
I could not toy
with you. Other times
we’ve been machine
—a polyphonic loom
when we living
loved, fabricating from ooze
and slap laughter—your sweet
scratch on my coffin-back: sign
I was the way you chose
(choose) out of death.
In the dream you passed
through some portal
not-me. I neither
held you like I have
our children nor
brought your body back
to sense by training skin-upon-skin
to call it:
it should work that way.
Instead I left you
under trees, the indicating
pines perpendicular—
pointing godward, a place
where things I’ve made
with my body are maybe
poems, but
—nothing else at all.
