Quilts
by Jane Springer

“Remembering Lewis”
by J. Gerald Kennedy

Little Deaths
by Barbara Lau

Little Deaths
    Barbara Lau

Enough of these tears, cried into the cranberry sauce!
It’s a guinea pig, for Christ’s sake. Dime-store bought,
an afterthought for the younger girl who never ranked a dog
of her own. Yet Bella was lovely, somehow—a calico luff
of fur that bunched and stretched like an accordion.
And she let me feel useful, picking clover for her
on each trip to the mailbox.
Now we build her a coffin out of Popsicle sticks.
It’s two days before Christmas, the ground a frozen rebuttal
to our stabs at digging a grave. “Your timing stinks,”
I mutter. But Lily thinks I’ve started the Lord’s Prayer,
which we stumble through, amen.
More dirt, snow, a poinsettia to mark the spot.
Then she spies a friend with a sled, leaving me
with this ridiculous waste of good tears
that no one wants to see. Not a girl on a sled
or a frozen pet or that other little death
in the bedroom next door. This one still walks,
sometimes talks, sometimes tosses me a crumb.
But she’s left us just the same, morphed
into a stranger who glowers at our words, fork-tongued,
pierce-lipped, coiled to strike. Precious little
in this house can rouse a smile. I want to
shake her, trip her, bleed the venom
from her soul. And plead come back, come back,
my songbird, my jester, my cartwheel across the floor—
for whom no ceremony of grief exists.