The wig looked like a muskrat,
on Mom’s head, its auburn
highlights indiscernible
under the funeral home’s fluorescents
and the feeling I’d walked in on
the wrong visitation. Dad was shaking
hands with his brother’s brother-in-law,
who was a third cousin from Mom’s side,
all of us a horde of red muskrats flushed
from the burrow, surfaced and crooked
from the shock. A mom dying
during a run was a sad story
you’d see on Facebook, not a rodent
I couldn’t stop staring at
long enough to say Hello
to teary nieces, strangers
anxious to offload their shock. Maybe
if I’d turned that rat’s comb clockwise
into bangs, I would have
recognized the corpse
as Mom, ready
for dirt and ash
and not this feeling
I walked into, marooned.
Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. A poet, information professional, and Madonna mega-fan, Ben is the host and a co-coordinator of POETRY STACKED at the University of Cincinnati, as well as a co-host of the MLVC Podcast. He is the author of It Was Never Supposed to Be (Variant Literature,) Twang (ELJ Editions) and Stiff Wrist (fourteen poems.) His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Florida Review, Palette Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other publications.
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