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from Please Bury Me in This [I am not any closer...]

Allison Benis White

I am not any closer to saying what I mean.

Love has made itself so quiet, a few red fish moving in slow circles.

I want to say like blood, like forgiveness, this obedience, looking at the ground on my knees.

I mean to cease to feel, to cancel, to give up all claim to—

At some point, I rested my hands over my eyes and mouthed, This is my face housed underwater.

This is a love letter.

Every word but mouthed erased.

More by this poet

Description of Symptoms

Now my hands buried
in my hair, resting on piano keys
in the back of my head.
This is the music I am playing
through my mind: a dark room singing
a song that will not have children.

Allison Benis White

2023

from Please Bury Me in This [I am writing to you...]

I am writing to you as an act of ending.

Cutting faces out of paper and folding them in envelopes like thoughts.

Am I a monster, Clarice Lispector asked in The Hour of the Star, or is this what it means to be human?

To be alive, I think as I cut another face.

What makes the shape become visible, and breathe, is the angle and variation of absence.

Sugar skull, I whisper, what I have known all along.

I am you gone.

Allison Benis White

2017

from Please Bury Me in This [In the museum of sadness...]

In the museum of sadness, in the museum of light—

I would climb so carefully inside the glass coffin and lower the lid.

Do you think the saying is true: when someone dies, a library burns down?

Maybe just a sentence, scratched slowly on the lid, Say what you mean.

Allison Benis White

2017

Poems

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from Please Bury Me in This [I am not any closer...]

More by this poet

Description of Symptoms

from Please Bury Me in This [I am writing to you...]

from Please Bury Me in This [In the museum of sadness...]

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