LAMENT WITH ASBESTOS AND BELLS

Because at the funeral mama glowed,
exalted in blue eyeshadow, lipstick
dabbed on for blush, and because galeros
strung from cathedral domes are connected
to ghosts, the Cardinals’ languorous rise to heaven,

My grandfather lay in a wood coffin
like that stuffed cockatoo hung from the ceiling
mama suspected was filled with asbestos,
and beauty’d begun with the smell of wax burning.

Because that morning a flock of cardinals
winged at my head, rustling
like choir silks, and because I couldn’t stalk
pheasants, foraging instead the sweet lawn
teeming with clover as a talisman against destruction,

I hated mowing, bees fleeing ahead
of lopped off flower heads, the tart
sap of grasses, bells ringing
in gladness or devastation.

Was it love to toss a cut tulip
into the dug plot, leave before the bulldozer
finished covering him up,
or the performance of love to say
like a child, he’s tucked in for the night?

Because in the dark garden blowflies
searched for a feast, I pushed peas on my plate,
gorging instead on sweets, and—don’t think of it, no—
the dirge bell struck; I was pulling the rope—

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Ploughshares. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She co-founded of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.