eulogy
she sounded like folk tunes
all the beated
breath of a banjo,
the lungs of a keyboard and the spine of that
damn guitar, too
we slipped her harmonica right in
between her rib cage
and the wafts of incense can still be found
deep from the cherry-wood casket
that girl was a honeyed
death’s-head moth [Acherontia atropos]
oh, they told her of flight,
so she flew
and when the sun dug into those waxy wings
by god,
she flew harder
she was disgusting thrift finds
gaudy earrings, embroidered ugly shrooms
(she was the ugly shroom
stumpy and a
little weepy)
—had those baby teeth til she was fifteen,
much like everything else about her
all fit a little big,
even with the belt on
at sixteen,
crushed Cap’n Crunch boxes
littered on the floor
gave home to the rats
and they’d skitter with the lights off
clawed hardwood,
chitter and chittering those
little mice
she’d lay wide-eyed and chatter with
the matted fur blotched onto carpet
through holes in the wall
they’d chirp,
she’d whimper
sometimes, though,
she thought if you
were particularly nice
they’d flee quick
back into
the crevasse of wall
Queen of the Rats,
she called herself
soft and slurred lilts—
she offered them always
though the very same
content of that speech:
rancorous spit and babble,
hushed and whined
through that kitschy army coat
green and sickly
she refused to believe it was nearing the end
[“All Ends are New Beginnings”]
she gave birth to three new breaths
right before that cord snapped
but no one else could hear it—
although, I bet she picked real good ones.
she loved grit and fingerpaintings,
Paddington and Silence of the Lambs,
she kissed firecrackers, lemon wedges
and she meteored down from
some type of grey:
stillness.
somewhere in the weeds,
you could pick a dandelion
and there was muck
and rot,
but beneath it all
there was a seedling—
there was her.
she gave birth to three last breaths
I bet she picked real good ones—
she would want them on her headstone,
but she forgot to write them down.
Giulyana Gamero is a senior communication major at SUNY Geneseo and the former Youth Poet for the city of Rockford. She loves to take on artistic projects in any medium, such as 89.3 WGSU’s Sunflower Story Hour, a paranormal audio drama. Her writing has appeared in Gandy Dancer issues 13.1 and 14.1, The Lamron, and in Carnegie Hall’s Traveling the Spaceways. Her visual art has appeared at the Rockford Art Museum and Bridgeport Art Center.