Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath

Do not hang your head or clench your fists

when even your friend, after hearing the story,

says: My mother would never put up with that.

Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,

more often, a woman who chooses to leave

is then murdered. The hundredth time

your father says, But she hated violence,

why would she marry a guy like that?—

don’t waste your breath explaining, again,

how abusers wait, are patient, that they

don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes

not even the first few years of a marriage.

Keep an impassive face whenever you hear

Stand by Your Man, and let go your rage

when you recall those words were advice

given your mother. Try to forget the first

trial, before she was dead, when the charge

was only attempted murder; don’t belabor

the thinking or the sentence that allowed

her ex-husband’s release a year later, or

the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue—

they should work it out themselves. Just

breathe when, after you read your poems

about grief, a woman asks: Do you think

your mother was weak for men? Learn

to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-

cloud above your head, dark and heavy

with the words you cannot say; let silence

rain down. Remember you were told

by your famous professor, that you should

write about something else, unburden

yourself of the death of your mother and

just pour your heart out in the poems.

Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that

reliquary—blood locket and seed-bed—and

contend with what it means, the folk-saying

you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:

that one does not bury the mother’s body

in the ground but in the chest, or—like you—

you carry her corpse on your back.