At the cemetery where my mother is buried, I lean

back against the rain-slicked granite and close my eyes, starlings

circling overhead. This is as close to her as I can feel, my hair splayed like

deciduous branches across the letters of her name, the dark

etching that shows what years she lived. Her gravestone is her

face, cold and wet with tears. On nice days, when the sun

goes behind a cloud, I imagine she is shutting her eyes to whiff

heliotropes, almond-scented and white—one of her favorites if

I remember correctly. Or hyacinth. Or hollyhock. It’s unfair that I can’t

just ask her, though I have learned to open sadness like a wet umbrella—

katydids singing asynchronously, iron gates, rain boots mud-caked, grief

like a cloak with a neck-hole I can’t fit my head through. I was prepared for  

misfortune—not for how hard it would be to convert the verbs to past tense.

Nobody taught me to say lived, not live. Loved, not love. At her funeral, I wanted to

open her casket and fill it with verbs in the present tense, a thousand

pieces of paper: make, think, say, feel, want, give, stay, stay, stay. As if the

quantity would make them true. Instead, I’m left with blank pages, words

resting in peace, a mother who isn’t returning to discuss the parts of

speech. My life is a sentence that can’t be diagrammed and I’m gritting

teeth. Dirt caked in my fingernails. I want. I wanted. I asked the

undertaker to make my face like hers. I lipsticked and eyeshadowed. I action

verbed. I disappeared behind a cloud, heliotroped and hyacinthed.

We hollyhocked. I read her name backward and it spelled

xiphoid—I could feel each letter swell in my chest as if I’d inhaled it.

Your mother loved you, said my dad, burying himself in whiskey. I funeraled a

zillion verbs, buried them so deep—I’ve already forgotten what they were.