My cousin murdered himself
because he felt. Because
he felt his family
did not care about him. Because
his family did not care
about him. The flight to get
to the funeral was too expensive,
the expansive sea too wide to
cross cheaply on a dime and,
chiefly, I could bury him myself:
stop at every shelf at the Costco,
just go up Vernon Boulevard, spend
an afternoon hanging around
the freezer aisle where I’ll
get the supplies to eat
my feelings. Find—while I
try not to imagine his blue body,
the rope, the long futile hour of
his dancing feet still finding the
floor—more food than I could ever
possibly use to atone. And so
I buy a family-size bag of pasta
and take it home, prepare to
sit alone and swallow it all.
But first: boil it and embalm
it in butter, and mutter a little
prayer about being thankful,
to the bag, for reminding me
that this, too, is the size of family.
Hanging Around
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Sabrina Orah Mark, and On the National Language with DeLanna Studi. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, a two-time Prix de la Photographie Paris winner, an Anthem Award winner for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and Kenyon Poetry Prize, and a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction.