Obituary 1: Starlings
O my mother. My loam.
My fall from second story windows.
My prayers etched with a piece of glass
into the palimpsest of my inner thigh.
My circling down and down and
down to hunt the smallest sadness
like a hawk searching for
a flash of furred movement.
My jaw hinged wide to swallow regret.
O the heavy bag of ashes (you
never weighed so much in the hospice bed),
nubs of teeth and bone taking turns
to worry escape holes into the plastic.
When I poured you into the cold ache
of Lake Superior, you roared and eddied,
you divided and multiplied,
a murmuration of underwater starlings.
The Innumerable Dead
Patient felt de-personalized and that his voice and limbs did not appear to be his own. He continuously asked, “What has become of the innumerable dead?”
– patient of Dr. Horace Le Marquand, London, 1924
Here lies the matriarch of my 51 winters,
dead this many hours under the Bone Moon.
Body like a glass bird I could break in my fist,
her terrible mouth in mid-howl, waiting for communion.
Winter storms consider the horizon, a mad-dark midnight
so frigid that bats drop from the ceiling of their Black Hills caves,
bees begin shivering around their queen, and we are gathered
with our mother for the last time. The hospice nurse, too cold
to consider travel, does not answer her phone so
we wait with our mother’s bones, all of us mute as if
a black river stone holds down our tongues. What becomes of death
when no one is there to pronounce it?
Toward the end, our mother had taken to
dripping raw honey into her eyes to
ward off the virus and the various hauntings.
See, even now she waits for
the bees to find her body.
What has become of my innumerable dead?
Oh this sorrow with
a breath-
so’ham
Ruach
ånde
My mother, thinking each limb
was a different place to hide inside the
hive of herself, always humming in the
key of middle C.
Capgras’ Syndrome: An Abbreviated History
This rare condition presents as
the delusion of doubles for which
there seems to be no cure and in
this essay I will-
Ms. F. revealed that her “real mother” had died long ago, an “imposter mother” was alive, living in a nursing home, and was a “double” of her real mother…[1]
My Mother’s ancestry was Her destruction, and
her destruction was her ancestry-
phenmetrazine,
cocaine,
haloperidol,
lithium,
amphetamines,
electroconvulsive therapy.
A scorched earth policy for the brain, if you will.
Lest this seem severe, I present –
Mrs. F. argued that three of her babies had been carried away and replaced with dead imposters, which led to her belief that there were hidden caverns beneath the streets of Paris filled with kidnapped children…[2]
O my missing sisters,
all my missing sisters,
did I dream you or are you
hunched in the tin-cup cold
dark under Parisian streets or
did I consume you in her womb?
I was in the Paris catacombs once.
Your skulls were placed in the form of a heart.
In addition, the patient argued quite convincingly that she herself had two or more doubles, and that they were part of a grand scheme to defraud her…[3]
My partner says my doppelgänger appears
when I am under periods of severe stress. He
catches her out of the corner of his eye. She
is floating down the hallway, full of sleeping pills.
She is leaving the house to fall in love with
someone else’s husband in an interstate motel.
She is plotting to steal the last will and testament,
and for evidence I offer-
Mrs. F could not explain why she had been hospitalized…[4]
One doctor removes a spine,
tiny as a translucent sea creature,
from a cyst on the back of my neck.
The ophthalmologist finds
the formation of a microscopic
beating heart, suspended in the
viscous center of my right eyeball.
All those sisters!
I had wrapped my body around them
as we rolled in our miniature salty sea of
Her own making. Their tears becoming
my own formless deep. When I was born,
imagine my mother’s horror when She shook me,
hearing all my sisters’ milk teeth, chattering
in my stomach like my grandmother’s bottle of pills.
[1] Berson, Robert J. Capgras’ Syndrome. City University of New York, 1982.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
In her day job, Ami Stearns is an associate professor of criminology at a southern university. She teaches courses on gender and theory on campus and a sociology of food class inside a local jail. Her creative self has been neglected since entering graduate school two decades ago and “Prairie Madness” represents a return to this self. She loves cats and books.
