At the undertaker’s I open the box,
pull pins from cuffs and collar,
shake out the folds, stroke the soft sleeve
of the nicest shirt my father will ever own.
Then, like the aproned women in The Gleaners,
with my sisters I bow over his pocket’s leavings.
White comb gray with oil.
Timex with replacement strap.
Cracked wallet― eleven dollars, club IDs,
and the last license issued to our mother
carried all these years behind his own.
She gazes there, as if gazing in,
as if not gazing―
Says she was ready, even then;
the high window an idea just forming.
Miriam O’Neal’s poems and reviews have appeared in Ablemuse, Ragazine, AGNI, Nottingham Review, Blackbird Journal, and many other magazines. She received an American Literary Translators Association, Beginning Translator Fellowship in 2007 for her partial translation of Alda Merini’s, Poem of the Cross. She has been a finalist in the Ablemuse Poetry Competition and in Louisiana Literature’s Annual Poetry Competition, as well as the Massachusetts Cultural Council Awards in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Writing & Literature, from Bennington College.
