Pops Could Come Back and Die Again
by Gabriel Ramirez
Eventually, I’ll tape baby's breaths
to my wall from Pops’ casket. Why delay?
Pops’ temper been haunting me. I’m growling
out my sleep. I’m an empty chapel.
I’m waiting for him to get up and leave.
Usually, I’ll pray louder than this.
I never take off his gold chain.
Amethyst crystals in river water
under moonlight, and Pops still won’t visit me.
If I speak of Pops in the present tense,
why don’t I accept ashes as his new body?
I have no respect to pay. Pops could
come back and die again and
I wouldn’t know the difference
between resurrection and wasted time.
I never take off his gold chain.
I rip out my teeth. Every extraction, a failure
to reanimate Pops, an entrance left unused.
Learn to not trust anything Pops said.
When he says, he has cancer. When he says,
he won’t live much longer. When he says,
in his last voicemail, I love you.
I never take off his gold chain.
to my wall from Pops’ casket. Why delay?
Pops’ temper been haunting me. I’m growling
out my sleep. I’m an empty chapel.
I’m waiting for him to get up and leave.
Usually, I’ll pray louder than this.
I never take off his gold chain.
Amethyst crystals in river water
under moonlight, and Pops still won’t visit me.
If I speak of Pops in the present tense,
why don’t I accept ashes as his new body?
I have no respect to pay. Pops could
come back and die again and
I wouldn’t know the difference
between resurrection and wasted time.
I never take off his gold chain.
I rip out my teeth. Every extraction, a failure
to reanimate Pops, an entrance left unused.
Learn to not trust anything Pops said.
When he says, he has cancer. When he says,
he won’t live much longer. When he says,
in his last voicemail, I love you.
I never take off his gold chain.
Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. You can find his work in publications like The Volta, Split This Rock, VINYL, Acentos Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020). Learn more about Gabriel @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com