Wake

The casseroles just showed up.
According to her sister a symbolic casting
 
of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear—
according to a friend she looked
 
just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon,
suitcase still in the trunk.
 
She’d carried him dead for days.
Out above the reeds a sphere of birds
 
stretches and knots, rises as one
brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger
 
when it came filled every chair.

Copyright Credit: Megan Snyder-Camp, “Wake” from The Forest of Sure Things. Copyright © 2010 by Megan Snyder-Camp. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.
Source: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press, 2010)