I Imagine My Mother’s Death

I imagine my mother’s death. It is curiouser
than I thought. It wears a waistcoat and gloves,
a great gold watch on a proper chain. It wears
a beaver hat. It is worried about being late.
My mother’s death does not smell like carrots
or little girls or rabbit holes. It wanders white
chapels, back alleys, the market’s blackest shadows,
black as baby carriages. It knows how to cut meat,
how to lure its prey with the promise of money,
sex, strawberries. It smells of strawberries and, if
only faintly, formaldehyde. My mother’s death
puts on its gloves and goes out for the night.
It finds a woman walking alone in the dark.
It hails her like a cab, enters her like a cab, offers
to help her paint the town red. She agrees, wanting
a way out, a waistcoat perhaps, a gold chain.
She dreams of carrots and rabbit holes, craves
even the maddest of hatters, someone to call her
Queen. When it is done with her, it wipes its knife
on the bib it has brought, then goes in search
of another. Another. They are all my mother.









Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of six books of poems and a book-length study on comics. He is also co-editor of Drawn to Marvel, an anthology of superhero poetry. Bryan has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Asimov's, Weird Tales, and many other journals. He has won The Paris Review Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and an Asimov's Readers Choice Award. Professor of English at Newman University, Bryan lives in Wichita, KS with his wife, Gina, and their son, Nick.