ON THE NTH ANNIVERSARY OF YOUR DEATH

Katherine Fallon

The first time I got a smartphone, it was mostly to text with a woman I’d just met, who slept shirtless in my bed, cyclically, before years of silence and who, a decade later, would become my wife beneath an oak tree in our backyard. She gifted me a Japanese maple that day. When you met her, you spoke like a child and the only thing you could ask was whether we were planning for children. What did it matter to you then, tethered to machines. You don’t visit. I have no dreams though once, an estranged friend called to report one: mute, no color but your eyes, blue as ice that holds shape in water. I am jealous. I use present tense. You can’t visit. My wife looks stricken when I unbox my grief, knowing there was never anything she could do, and even less now it’s been long enough you’ve lost your meat, could have skeletonized six times over. I don’t know what I was trying to type the other day, but the phone autocorrected to read Dad, undying, comma and all. If I believed in signs, I would invent one.

 

About the author

Katherine Fallon is the author of the chapbooks Zero Sum (Bottlecap Press), The Book on Fractures (Ghost City Press), The Toothmakers' Daughters (Finishing Line Press), and Demoted Planet (Headmistress Press). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Meridian, Passages North, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Whittle Micro-Press. You can find her online at katherinefallon.com or on Instagram @ghostelephants.

Katherine just moved to the Baltimore area from Georgia and is having a really great time exploring.