by Farley Egan Green
Objects live on after humans go south, or west, or wherever it is we end up. Victorians snipped locks of hair from the dead, made filigreed brooches, pinned them to corseted chests. They mourned ritually, formally, for a long time.
Me I pin a red, green and silver wreath to my good wool coat each year. You bought it, you said, on Christmas Eve and gave it to me to wear. Other times you sent opera disks, books, needlepoint, New Yorker cartoons. And there is more stuff I claimed later, after, when we entered your little house, tsk-tsked the mess, sorted and cleaned, found private things and threw them away. You would have died, once, to be so exposed but cancer had done that job.
We shared a hard-shell sort of sibling love, you and I. We never managed to loosen our corsets, unbutton our coats, weave brooches of ease.
My Christmas pin sparkles in the fading light.