WHAT THEY LEFT OUT OF MY OBITUARY

What They Left Out of My Obituary:

Father Pritikin, Dead at 85

You've heard of me: when I was seventeen

I threw the perfect pass, seventy yards,

breaking the school record. Those present said

the pigskin arched into the sun, but I

saw nothing, only that same sun spinning spots

while my breath's smoke pawed the cold.

You wouldn't have heard I spent my twenty-first

in a Guatemalan hut, shivering with heat,

brown-skinned women crowding me, muttering padre,

padre, and forcing me to drink hot tea.

Or that at seven, I found my mother's razor

in the bathtub nook and slipped my thumb across

the blade.  As blood spilled forth I knew

nothing but dead leaves crisping underfoot.

When I was conceived, it was winter.  That spring

the snow never melted, just crusted into ice.

My mother toe-heeled, toe-heeled as belly swelled,

or did she run, hoping to slip, to jar me loose?

At fourteen, I found freckles, light and flat,

across the clavicle of a girl on the field

hockey team, constellations spilling across bare

shoulders while the trees pulsed green.

WHY LENIN'S EMBALMER WILL MISS DINNER

I heard Vlasta got her hands on a bit

of beef and I have a Canon Fronsac

hidden here in my desk,

but now a dark bloom on his right cheek—

It appeared when he was soaking

in his acetate bath (the lights are too

bright in that lab) and they demand

it fixed, tonight, after I fill

the bullet hole in

Mikhoels (motor accident)

for his lying-in-state.

I promised, I know, but this

is a delicate matter, what with

nights, boots up the back staircase,

mornings, doors jawing open

and new neighbors next week.

You cannot blame me for this,

at least. And I send flowers, your favorite,

Annushka— hothouse amaryllis—

very hard to come by this time of year.

Please don't pout. I'd prefer your

cheek, truly, to his, to a night spent

swabbing his dark blossom with bleach.

Shelley Puhak's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, Ontario Review and Third Coast. She is a 2004 graduate of the Low-Residency MFA program at the University of New Orleans.