ELEGY FOR MY UNDEAD BROTHER

Kat Finch

Imagine I am a monster.

Imagine there are others
   who imagine I am a monster. We
are standing a ways away

from an abbey in northeastern
   France. We are amidst a necropolis.
We are burying you, or perhaps,

a distant relic of you. Either way,
   you are there with me. I fondle
the thin walls of your cranial bones.

When we step into the now excavated
   grave, you enter your best
life. Look at it this way:

Catullus says "forever" before ave
atque vale, indicating
that the position of your face

(west) + the position of your feet
   (east) is a parting gift, for we
will never again

meet, regardless which side
   of the vale we inhabit.
Scientists insist we are divine

omens— that the layout of yourself
   in death prevised the kindness given
to you in life. Brother, what

do they call stained-glass windows
   in unfinished churches? Do
they count the sutures

where your wormian bones overlap,
   as I do? See me— I am
practicing my monstrousness

in the grave. I rip apart your cranium
   at those seams. I disrupt the repose of your
lovingly arrayed remains + devour them—

if I am to be a monster, I will be a good monster.

__

I sometimes wonder if I should die first or if my brother should. So I wrote these elegies. I think more poets should write about their own awfulness. I read [this article], or one like it, and found the idea of not being stigmatized a very great and dramatic claim. How could you know? How could you?