Will you taste as good in death
as you do in life?
You say that’s up to you, isn’t it?
After you’re cremated, you said,
you don’t wish
to be scattered, rather
you want to be spooned into my daily
morning espressos. I agree.
Sugar ruins the bitter
anyway. In Massachusetts
you’re mandated
to be burned in a coffin,
so I’m already imagining pine,
robin songs
trapped, Costco-brand
lacquer, the wood’s cheep
eons commingled with your tattoos
savory memory, the guttural
romance of your unmentionables,
every still-uncooked
bone. This delectable grief
should take years,
you say. Revolting how we’re supposed
to sit out eternity on a shrine,
or bubble wrapped in an attic,
or tossed to the wind
like a common grandmother.
No. Death, you say, must feed, nourish.
No. You deserve to evaporate
into time’s granular distance.
I say, let’s be concocted.
How we never let ourselves in life.
How I’ll find your last few grams
as rations–
Not to savor, but hoard. Steam
off my espresso
will curl like a mustache.
Every last grain divvied
with an exact-o knife. Grace
is an eel with a harmonica
at your jar’s dry
bottom. I live for the day
I reach it, grasp
that eel, reveal it was the tired rope
that leads down
toward musty salvation. Come,
it says, we still have much to lose.

– Woody Woodger

Author’s Note: My boyfriend asked—nay, demanded—that the only thing he wanted after death was to be fully consumed. He wants to be cremated and said that he’d give me the honor of putting a teaspoon of him in my espresso every morning instead of sugar. I knew that when he said it, this poem had to be written. I imagine myself as an old woman taking the bag of him out of the cupboard and fishing out a little of him in the dewy morning light, my hands shaky with age. I have to lean on the counter to stand, but I don’t even breath, determined to lose not a single ounce of him. Him dandelion. Him before my medication. Every bitter morning a prayer.