Wake

Poetry by CD Steele

my mother’s mother died in a hospital:   pneumonia—too many birthdays. 

always on TV the adult child finds the parent’s body and rings 9-1-1. Don’t–
don’t, I am already 

                                             gone. just stay awhile with me / my body 

that dead bodies spread disease is a myth in the American funeral industry, stemming partially

from a misapprehension of bad air—

                                                         miasma theory. 

when my mother’s mother died in Oregon, state law required embalming 

to transport her to the family plot in Kentucky. 

a “wake” is a gathering originating from the practice of holding vigil over a body in case the dead 
should waken. 

before she died      her mother set out the clothes she wished to be buried in: 

a favorite sweater   pants   thick socks   

                                                                           her feet were always so   cold. 

in the nineteenth century, amidst outbreaks of cholera and bubonic plague, arose a widespread fear of premature burial. 

bodies promptly removed from the home spent days awaiting interment at the cemeteries 
until they showed signs
of decay. 

a hiker in the Pyrenees suffers from hypothermia and dies 

in a snowstorm,    six hours after her heart stops she is revived in the hospital with a special machine 


and makes a full recovery. the awake waken to the shared tongue of grief: 


that a body isn’t dead

                                                         unless it is warm,


that she died while I was in my mother’s belly and disapproved of the pregnancy.       a thread

pulled underground         a chill bell ringing— a dream of my uncle in which he smuggles my spirit back to my body. 


the corpse of a woolly mammoth, perfectly preserved, is uncovered from a melting glacier. 

its genes are teased out and spliced with a modern relative that hopes to restore the Arctic tundra.


                 I am talking to the dead, 

                                                                           articulating their remains. 




I am trying to recreate   a face half seen in frosted glass.   I am trying 

to recreate   death, a semipermeable barrier.    I am trying to recreate their 

hearts, precisely 
                                                                    thawed.

CD Steele (they/he) is a queer writer who grew up in the shrub steppe of rural Oregon and a poetry reader for Chestnut Review. Their work is influenced by the intersection of history, archive, and culture. His writing is published in CRAFT Magazine, The Palouse Review, and Beaver Magazine.