Skip to main content

Mark Borczon

Scattering My Father's Ashes

My portion of my late father's ashes sit on top of my refridgerator. The urn is right between his laminated obituary and the bottle of Ten High whiskey that I am draining tonight. I am charged to leave handfuls of him in places that fit well with his memory. As of now I have not left any of him anywhere. I can not bare to let him go. I can press my ear to his vessel and still hear his voice. He tells me to let him go. I want to but I fail. I tell him of my guilt and he comforts me. He wants to go but he does not want to hurt me.

As in life also in death he loves me even in my weakness.

Tonight my woman was pacing and smoking. She can't wind down for sleep. There is a medication she can not afford. So, she paces the floor ashing her cigarette into every bowl, cup and plate in the apartment. Finally, without thinking, she ashes into my glass of whiskey.

I say nothing. I watch the ash break apart and slowly float to the bottom of my drink. This gives me the idea.

I go to the kitchen, take down the urn and take a pinch of my father's ashes. I drop them into my glass of whiskey and watch them spiral to the bottom.

I drink the whole thing in one burning pull. I swallow the cigarette ash and the ashes of my father in seconds. In seconds my father and I are one again.

Now I will scatter him over my whole life. I will leave him at work through my sweat. I will scatter him in every toilet I sit on. I will leave him inside my woman after sex. I will leave him in my daughter's hair after every kiss good bye.

I needed to find a place to scatter my father's ashes. Someplace I could visit to honor his life.

The place I chose was my life. It is the only place I know where his memory arebitrates the universe the way only the Gods can.

I leave his ashes as close to my bones as I can manage.

Mark Borczon is a poet from Erie, Pennsylvania. He works as a custodian at a small state university in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Borczon is the author of He Was A Good Father, Nixes Mate's press, Somebody's Book Of The Dead, Alien Buddha Press and Whatever This Is, Poet's hall Press. Borczon has 3 kids and lives in a one room apartment with Janice and their cat Nadja.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg  We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet  in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,