Guarding the Body
by Alisha Goldblatt
The moon at half-mast this tail end of December
before dawn, and my shift begins with a long
wait in the just cold where breath becomes smoke.
Her son-in-law wakes disoriented in the chapel, babbling
about being locked in and unresponsive to my knocking.
When he finds himself again, it’s that the door to the
hallway has jammed, so he uses his credit card to swipe
like a burglar in those 70s stories and folds up the cot
where he slept deeply in vigil last night. This morning
they will come for the body. She has three more hours aboveground.
Moss green carpet, floral drapes, the chintz of an older decorating
scheme. I’m not ashamed to say I snooped in the close, tangled
office where desktops groan to keep up and religious detritus
from another era is frumpy and perfect, right down to the stray
box of holiday style Manischewitz cake meal on the shelf next to
staplers and obsolete manuals on the Jewish way in death and
mourning. Down the back stairway I found gurneys but no glimpse
of the coffin, nothing to catch my own breath but empty shrouds,
zippers flopped open. Somewhere in the psalms we ask for
lessons in treasuring our days so we may live wise in the heart.
In the same book their throat is an open grave. Sounds become fistfuls of dirt.
Now she’s a column of words in a newsletter,
reminding us against the swallowed resentments,
hammered images, misspent hours, all of it swept dust.
Alisha Goldblatt is an English teacher and writer living in Portland, Maine, with her two wonderful children and one lovely husband. She has published poems in the Common Ground Review, River Heron Review, Burningword Literary Journal, and others, and essays in Stonecoast Review, Wisconsin Review, and MothersAlwaysWrite. Alisha writes whenever she can and gets published when she’s lucky.
