poems for the dead

God Can be Found in Grandmothers

a poem about my grandmother and the last time I saw her that I wrote for my creative writing class:
tw: vague mention of suicide attempt, death

The world sways as I stumble into the room.
My head is caving in on itself,
my guts boil like a disgusting soup ready to spill over any second.
Mom sits next to her, helping.

She can't even drink juice on her own anymore.
Wrinkled hands shake with effort,
Mom holds them still for her.

My eyes won't look at her, my body stays still,
almost as if we are magnets of the same polarity.
Maybe that's why I could never really reach her.

Her chest still rises and falls, her heart continues to beat,
but she might as well be six feet under already.
Normally being near her would fill your nose with a strong smell of bleach,
she found God in the absence of dirt.
All I smell now is the remnants of puke and weeks worth of grime
built up on her body like graffiti on a church.

I watch a piece of her hair as it wiggles around the floor,
I watch the trees sway in the wind outside the window,
I watch my knee in its violent up and down motion.
I do not watch my independent, stubborn grandmother struggle to drink juice.

Dark matted curls stick to my skull, ten gallon garbage bags hang under my eyes.
She's not the only one who stinks.
She clings to life,
while I try to throw mine away.

My heart is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
over a thousand bars of pressure weigh it down.
I heard somewhere that as humans we've explored more of outer space than our own oceans.

She loved Star Trek.
Maybe she's out there waiting for me,
in the far recesses of the Universe where no man has gone before,
not even Captain Kirk.

She finds religion in the clean, I find it in her.
A matriarch died in the deprivation of her faith,
still I am expected to live without mine.