The Crematorium
“‘Dying isn’t the end of the world,’ my mom liked to joke.”
We are following two black-suited undertakers across the one-hundred-degree parking lot out to a windowless metal building—my dad; my brother, Charlie; his wife, Amelia; me. My husband is at work, our kids at school. It is the day before my mom’s memorial service. My phone is buzzing in my pocket with texts of flight arrivals and last-minute arrangements.
The uglification of America,
we
This is the end,
Please come back,Dad wants to put you in this.
Nina Riggs lives and writes in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received her MFA in poetry in 2004 from UNCG and published a chapbook of poems, Lucky, Lucky, in 2009. She works at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York.
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